GEO: what academic research actually says (not agency marketing)
Florent Dabernat
June 23, 2026
2 min read
In this article
Most of what you find on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is agency marketing with no verifiable methodology. One study stands out: an academic paper from Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi, with measured numbers.
A rare academic study in an ocean of marketing content
The foundational paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (Aggarwal et al., presented at KDD 2024) tests nine writing strategies and measures their effect on a visibility metric, the Position-Adjusted Word Count, which assesses how much a piece of content gets picked up and featured in an AI-generated answer.
As far as I know, it's the only quantified, verifiable source on this topic to date. The rest of the GEO/AEO market is still overwhelmingly made up of agency marketing content that cites this paper without reproducing its methodology, a point I've been able to verify by cross-checking several sources directly.
What works, what doesn't
The results are precise: adding quotations improves visibility by +41%, adding statistics by +31%, citing sources by +30%, optimizing writing fluency by +27%, and a more authoritative tone by +12%. Conversely, keyword stuffing lowers visibility by -8%, a counterproductive result that directly contradicts old classic-SEO reflexes.
Adding sourced quotations and statistics increases a piece of content's citability by 30 to 40%, while keyword stuffing degrades it. That's a defensible technical vocabulary, far more solid than the generic checklists found elsewhere.
Putting the phenomenon in perspective
A large-scale study led by Conductor, covering 13,770 domains and 17 million AI answers between May and September 2025, offers a useful counterpoint: AI-referred traffic still only accounts for 1.08% of total web traffic, growing at about 1% per month. ChatGPT alone generates roughly 87.4% of that referred traffic, and Google's AI Overviews appear in about 25% of searches.
That figure puts things in perspective: the topic is strategic to address early, but it doesn't yet dominate overall traffic. The right positioning isn't to oversell urgency, but to position yourself as an early mover on a rapidly growing phenomenon.
To see where your own site stands on these criteria, IDSEED's free SEO/GEO audit reviews the essential points.
Frequently asked questions
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Does GEO replace traditional SEO?
- No, it complements it. Both approaches share fundamentals (clear structure, quality content) but GEO adds specific techniques (quotations, sourced statistics) that don't carry the same weight in classic SEO.
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Does keyword stuffing really have a measured negative effect?
- Yes, according to the Princeton/Georgia Tech/IIT Delhi study, it lowers visibility by 8%, a result that contradicts habits inherited from classic SEO and deserves to be clearly communicated to clients.
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Should a small business already invest heavily in GEO?
- AI-referred traffic remains low in absolute volume (about 1% of total web traffic), but it's growing fast. An early, reasonable investment positions the company ahead of the curve, without requiring an immediate full overhaul.