New defense cuts malicious GEO attack success rate to 6%
A new arXiv preprint introduces GEO Defender, a two-stage defense for generative search systems facing malicious generative engine optimization (GEO)…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Sep 2 · · Research, GEO
GEO
GEO — generative engine optimization — is the practice of optimizing content for visibility in generative engines: AI systems that compose answers from retrieved sources. Full entry for GEO in the glossary.
Ten Speed study — vendor-published
Ten Speed: product pages draw 24% of AI citations, Reddit 4%
Ten Speed analyzed 170 B2B buyer-evaluation prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, generating 7,387 citation appearances tracked via the…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 3 · · Research, AEO, GEO
New benchmark: AI guardrails miss most GEO misinformation attacks
A new arXiv preprint introduces Counter-GEO-Bench, a benchmark for testing whether AI safety guardrails catch misinformation delivered through generative…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Sep 2 · · Research, GEO
Contentsquare study — vendor-published; fieldwork dates and margin of error undisclosed
Contentsquare: poor sites push AI shoppers toward rivals
A Contentsquare survey of 2,000 consumers in the US and France found that when an AI-recommended website disappoints a shopper, 23% switch to a competitor…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Sep 2 · · AEO, GEO
New buyer-persona corpus measures demand for AI citations
A new arXiv preprint describes PersonaGen-1M, a corpus of 1,031,732 synthetic buyer personas spanning 511 industry labels and 4 market contexts, built to…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Aug 30 · · Research, GEO
Study: repeated GEO optimization homogenizes content
A new arXiv preprint introduces CHASE, a simulation framework testing what happens when content creators repeatedly rewrite documents to match…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Aug 31 · · Research, GEO
Competitor-aware GEO strategy selection beats single-heuristic baselines
A paper posted to arXiv on August 27 formalizes generative-engine-optimization strategy selection as a competitor-aware problem: as adoption of…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Aug 27 · · Research, GEO
catch-up (Jun 16)
LLMs favor well-known brands until reviews tip the scale
Testing GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet and Gemini on skincare product recommendations, researchers Xi Chu and Yupeng Hou found that when competing products…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Jun 16 · · Research, GEO, AEO
Benchmark flags GEO-optimized content in live search results
A GEOFlagBench study — 3,200 pages spanning eight GEO optimizer families — trained a detector, Intervention-Paired Training on ModernBERT, that raised F1…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Aug 17 · · Research, GEO
Study models AI citation-seeking as a repeated game, proposes a reward fix
A new paper models the escalating cycle of publishers rewriting content to chase generative-engine citations — which can degrade document quality and…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Aug 11 · · Research, GEO
Gen Z consideration for Claude and OpenAI nearly doubles, YouGov finds
Gen Z consideration of Claude climbed from 14.2% to 28.1% and of OpenAI from 10.1% to 22.1% between Q1 and Q2 2026, per YouGov BrandIndex data reported by…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Aug 7 · · Research, AEO, GEO
geoSurge study — vendor-published
Study finds AI models search more often for brands they already know
A geoSurge study found AI models search for familiar brands 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar ones — 55.7% versus 17.4% of the time — per Search Engine…
Via Search Engine Land ↗ · Jul 30 · · Research, AEO, GEO
New benchmark tests fact-checkers against GEO-style evidence poisoning
Researchers introduce GPE, a multi-domain fact-verification benchmark and evaluation framework that lets evaluators control evidence sources and poisoning…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Jul 22 · · Research, GEO
arXiv survey maps generative engine optimization research, 2023-2026
A critical survey of 45 studies frames GEO as a stochastic, partially observable pipeline spanning retrieval, citation, prominence and user behavior — not…
Via arXiv GEO ↗ · Jul 15 · · Research, GEO