Winning AI citations
isn’t the same as
winning in search.
Cyrus Shepard on what search teams should measure now.
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A change that nets you more AI citations sounds like a win. Until the same change costs you search traffic.
We have seen this in real GEO experiments. Cyrus Shepard has researched how and why it happens.
We can measure more
than we understand.
At SearchPilot we have seen a GEO win turn into a search loss in a real experiment. Cyrus Shepard has researched how and why that happens.
It points at a bigger problem with AI discovery. We can measure more things than we actually understand.
Cyrus reviewed hundreds of AI citation studies, experiments and patents to work out what appears to influence citations. What he found is that getting cited and getting recommended are not the same thing.
Citations can be easier to win. They are also easier to put on a dashboard. That does not make them the thing that matters most.
If your team is being pushed to show progress in GEO, this hour is about not optimising a metric while missing the outcome.
Seven things worth
an hour of your week.
Why a GEO win can still be a search loss
Will shares a SearchPilot experiment where a change built for LLM discovery helped there and hurt Google. Optimising one part of search on its own can give you a misleading definition of winning.
Why an AI citation is not an AI recommendation
A citation tells you where an AI system found supporting information. It does not have to become a recommendation. Cyrus explains why the two get blurred, and why chasing the easiest thing to track can send teams the wrong way.
Fan-out queries and grounding queries
The searches an AI runs to gather information, the searches it runs to validate it, and why the citations you can see are only part of what is happening.
What Google’s click data tells us now
For years the industry argued about whether Google used click behaviour. Recent disclosures gave us a much better look. Cyrus walks through good clicks, bad clicks and long clicks, and what they mean for the pages you build and test.
Why content effort is getting interesting
Keywords and links are not the whole story. Google’s Quality Rater guidance looks at effort, originality and creativity. First-hand evidence, strong opinions and original research get more valuable as AI-generated content gets easier to produce.
Why AI broke the old attribution story
Content now influences Google, AI answers, social and video without giving marketers the neat attribution line they are used to.
Why prompt tracking is probably not the end game
Leadership interest in AI search has moved faster than the tools to measure it. Will and Cyrus talk about the gap between the questions executives ask and what search teams can answer today.
Two people who test this
for a living.
Will Critchlow is the CEO and co-founder of SearchPilot, the SEO experimentation platform that helps enterprise websites, especially large ecommerce sites, take search out of React Mode and put it into Control Mode.
After 15 years running Distilled, Will founded SearchPilot in 2020 to give marketing and engineering teams a way to run statistically rigorous SEO A/B tests across thousands of pages and prove which changes actually move performance.
Cyrus Shepard has spent years digging into the parts of search most people do not have time to investigate.
He has worked as a Google Quality Rater, analysed 81,000 title tags and 23 million internal links, and most recently reviewed the strongest available experiments, studies, explainers and patents on AI citations. His work turns search research into ideas SEO teams can actually test.
Winning AI citations isn’t the same as winning in search.
Join Will and Cyrus on 30 September and see what to measure instead.