R3 — Favor body-text citations, quotations and statistics over schema markup as the AI-visibility lever; the peer-reviewed lift is in body text

Rule: When the goal is AI-answer citation, invest editorial effort in body-text citations, quotations and statistics before investing more in schema markup. The peer-reviewed evidence is on the body-text side.

Why: Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (Princeton / Georgia Tech / Allen AI / IIT Delhi, KDD '24) — citations + quotations + statistics in visible text lift source visibility by >40% across queries — over 40% visibility lift in generative-engine answers from edits to visible page text, NOT schema. The methodology caveat (GEO paper — critical methodology caveat: the lifts come from BODY-TEXT edits, NOT schema markup; authors explicitly note "less likely to affect search engine rankings") is explicit: schema is not the lever. There is no independent or primary evidence for the corresponding schema claim (GAP — no independent or primary evidence that schema markup ITSELF improves AI-answer citation; vendor claims (FAQ schema → 2.8× citations, author schema → 3×) are single-source and unverified).

How to apply:

• On every working-surface page, build editorial discipline around: (a) citing primary sources by name and date; (b) including direct quotations; (c) including hard statistics with attribution.
• The pattern is what this very brief does — every claim has Source / Confidence / Caveat. Apply that discipline to client content where AI-citation matters.
• This rule is editorial-discipline ([[editorial-discipline]]), not technical-SEO.