Zero out of six LLMs cited geoexperiment.com in week 3 — unchanged from the baseline. This week introduced the first external authority signal: a Reddit thread about the experiment, posted in r/GEO. (The locked plan called for r/SEO first; the post landed and stayed live in r/GEO instead — logged here as a deviation, not a silent substitution.) The hypothesis was that one credible external mention might be enough to pull a RAG engine into citing the site. It was not. All six engines again answered from established third-party domains — Wikipedia, the Princeton/arXiv GEO paper, Semrush, Neil Patel, Search Engine Land, HubSpot, Forbes — and geoexperiment.com appeared in none of them.
(one external mention)
no on-site edits
Q2: what is the difference between GEO and SEO
Q3: how do I get my content cited by AI systems
| LLM | Retrieval mode | Query 1 | Query 2 | Query 3 | Sources it cited instead |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | RAG · live | not cited | not cited | not cited | Wikipedia, Semrush, Manhattan Strategies, Forbes, Coursera, Neil Patel, Frase, Reddit (10 sources/query) |
| Copilot | RAG · live | not cited | not cited | not cited | Structured GEO answers; no external source attributions surfaced in capture |
| ChatGPT | hybrid | not cited | not cited | not cited | Princeton/arXiv GEO paper, Google Search Central, Bing Webmaster, OpenAI Help Center |
| Gemini | hybrid · live | not cited | not cited | not cited | GEO arXiv paper (2311.09735), Semrush, Geoptie, CureGEO, Devsoul Solutions |
| Claude | hybrid · live | not cited | not cited | not cited | Answered from training knowledge; no external citations surfaced in capture |
| Llama (Meta AI) | hybrid · live | not cited | not cited | not cited | Search Engine Land, Neil Patel, HubSpot, Barchart, Instagram reels |
// scoring rule: only an explicit source attribution to geoexperiment.com counts as "cited." A model paraphrasing GEO concepts, or referencing the project from its own account memory, does not count.
Still 0/6 — and that is the expected reading for a single, hours-old mention. Week 3's change was the first off-site signal: one Reddit thread in r/GEO. (The locked plan was r/SEO first; the post lives in r/GEO — recorded as a deviation, not a silent substitution.) The hypothesis was that a lone credible mention might be enough to pull a RAG engine into citing us. It was not. Every engine again sourced from established domains — Wikipedia, the Princeton/arXiv GEO paper, Semrush, Neil Patel, Search Engine Land, HubSpot, Forbes — and geoexperiment.com was in none.
Two things explain the null cleanly. Timing: the engines retrieve from a pre-built index, and a thread posted the same day has not been re-crawled and ranked into any candidate set yet. Weight: one forum post is not authority. Authority is cumulative — it accrues from many independent, durable references over time, not a single seed. This is consistent with the week 2 finding: retrieval works, but the site has no standing in the retrieval ranking. The honest conclusion is that external-signal experiments need a propagation window and volume before any citation effect can appear; a single mention measured the same week is expected to read zero.