BetterAISearch

What actually worksin AI search.Backed by evidence.

AI search is taking organic traffic — and most advice on what to do is vendor marketing or untested opinion. 129 reviewed sources. 31 tactics scored by evidence quality. Type a claim to check it against the research.

31tactics fact-checked
129sources reviewed
435research findings
4platforms tracked
Schema Markup Didn't Move AI Citations In Ahrefs Test — May 2026Sample-Efficient Optimization over Generative Priors via Coarse Learnability — May 2026TBPN Interview with Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch — May 2026Lighthouse agentic browsing scoring — May 2026Testing how AI models crawl websites with LLMs.txt — May 2026Authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth (experimental) — May 2026Conductor AI Referral Traffic Research — May 2026GDPval — May 2026

By platform

What moves the needle, per platform.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews use different signals. Optimising for one does not help the others. Here's the breakdown.

ChatGPT

Favors authoritative domains, Wikipedia, Reddit. E-E-A-T signals move the needle most. Statistics and first-party citations help.

Perplexity

Prioritises recent content — freshness within 30 days is the dominant signal. Direct, extractable answers rank highest.

Google AI Overviews

Heavily correlated with existing organic rankings. Structured data and featured snippet optimisation overlap significantly.

Gemini

Knowledge Graph entity presence over domain authority. Schema markup and brand entity strength are key differentiators.

Research blog

When the evidence surprises you

Deep dives into findings that contradict the conventional wisdom

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strategy

Generative engine optimisation (GEO): what it is, what the research shows, and how to do it

Generative engine optimisation is the practice of improving content so AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini — select it as a citation source. Here is the evidence base: what GEO tactics are confirmed, which are overhyped, and how to prioritise.

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strategy

ChatGPT SEO: how to get cited in ChatGPT answers — what the research actually shows

ChatGPT does not use backlinks or PageRank. It selects sources based on author authority, content structure, brand entity recognition, and retrieval relevance. Here is what controlled studies show about how to get your content cited in ChatGPT answers.

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strategy

Keyword research tools for AEO: what works, what does not, and what the evidence says about how LLMs actually select answers

Traditional keyword tools measure Google search volume. AEO optimises for LLM answer selection. The two problems require fundamentally different inputs. Here is what the research shows about how to identify the queries where AI systems are choosing sources — and how to become one of them.

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research

E-E-A-T for AI search: how Google's quality framework applies to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and LLM citations — and where it diverges

Google's E-E-A-T framework was built for human raters assessing traditional search results. AI systems weight its signals differently — and some signals that matter for Google barely register for ChatGPT or Perplexity. Research from Presence AI, AccuraCast, and Ahrefs shows where E-E-A-T applies to AI search and where the framework needs updating.

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technical

AI crawlability audit: what Writesonic found when they tested 62 webpage elements across 6 AI crawlers — and what it means for your site

JSON-LD scored zero out of six for readability across all major AI crawlers tested. The title tag was the only metadata element that 5 of 6 crawlers could read. A Writesonic study of 62 webpage elements reveals which technical signals AI systems actually ingest — and what a proper AI crawlability audit should check.

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research

Two studies gave opposite answers on ideal content length for AI citations. Here is how to read both.

An AirOps analysis of 815,484 pages found the AI citation sweet spot is 500 to 2,000 words. A separate study of 30 million citations found 10,000-word pages get 62 times more citations. Both are correct. They are measuring different things.

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research

GPT-4o and Google share only 4% of the same sources. Your SEO strategy is addressing a fraction of AI search.

A peer-reviewed arXiv study found that GPT-4o draws from a source pool that overlaps with Google by only 4%. Branded web mentions predict AI citations 3x more strongly than backlinks. Here is what the data says about how SEO and GEO differ and what actually drives AI visibility.

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research

81% of AI-cited pages use schema markup. FAQ schema appears in 1.8% of them.

An analysis of 9,000 AI citation sources found that FAQ schema, the most recommended structured data type, appears in almost none of the pages ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews actually cite. Person schema appears in 58.9%. Here is what the data shows.

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Stay current

Stop being the last to know what actually works.

GEO advice changes faster than any team can track. We add new research as it publishes and update tactic scores when the evidence shifts — so you know what to act on and what to ignore before it becomes LinkedIn noise.

Why trust this

Every claim is sourced and scored.

FAQ schema appears in 1.8% of AI-cited pages. It is still in every GEO checklist. Most advice online is untested opinion or vendor marketing. We publish only what is backed by independent research — and we show when evidence conflicts.

Tier 1 — Platform official

Direct from Google, Perplexity, OpenAI, Microsoft. Highest signal.

Tier 2 — Academic research

Peer-reviewed or pre-print studies. arXiv, Princeton, university labs.

Tier 3 — Independent experiment

Controlled practitioner tests with documented methodology.

Tier 4 — Vendor research

Industry reports from Ahrefs, BrightEdge, etc. Discounted for bias.

Old research is automatically down-weighted

AI search platforms change fast. Every tactic score reflects how recent its evidence is — a tip backed only by old studies scores lower automatically. How the scoring works →