Study of 2M AI citations: domain authority beats SEO signals

Discovered Labs co-founders Ben Moore and Liam Dunne, in an arXiv preprint, analyzed roughly 2 million citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI and Gemini over six months, joined to 10,000 pages across 19 B2B SaaS workspaces. Testing 60-plus page features across nine statistical methods, they found prompt-content alignment — word overlap between a page and the wording of real prompts — was the strongest predictor (beta +0.37), while traditional SEO signals like FAQ blocks, structured data and Core Web Vitals showed positive citation correlations that reversed or collapsed to zero once domain-level effects were controlled for; domain-level AI authority outweighed the next-strongest feature sixfold in SHAP value. Discovered Labs is an AEO/GEO agency for B2B SaaS companies, and the study’s authors are its founders.