Most of the conversation around GEO and AEO is about getting retrieved. Getting your content into the pool that an AI system pulls from when it’s assembling an answer.
Retrieval is not the goal, citation is.
There’s a meaningful difference between your content being considered and your content being used. The brands winning in AI search right now aren’t just producing more content and hoping the volume works in their favor. They’re producing the right types of content that convert from retrieval to citation at a higher rate than everything else.
After studying citation patterns across dozens of queries in our clients’ industries, five source types showed up consistently as the ones that actually close that gap.
Why the retrieval-to-citation ratio matters
AI systems pull from a large pool of potentially relevant content when assembling a response. Most of that content gets retrieved and then discarded because it doesn’t meet whatever threshold the model is using for citation quality. The brands that understand this stop asking how do I get more content out there and start asking what kind of content actually makes the cut.
Chasing volume on the wrong source types is one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see. You can publish 50 blog posts and get retrieved constantly and cited almost never. Or you can publish five things in the right formats and show up in AI answers consistently. The ratio is what matters.
Here are the five source types that convert.
1. Wikipedia entity pages
Wikipedia has the highest retrieval-to-citation ratio of any source type we’ve tracked. AI systems treat it as a baseline trust signal. If your brand, your founder, or your core framework has a legitimate Wikipedia presence, you are starting every query from a position of verified authority.
The key word is legitimate. Thin pages, promotional language, and unsourced claims get flagged and removed. Getting onto Wikipedia the right way means having third-party coverage that establishes notability first. Press mentions, industry awards, conference appearances, academic citations. The Wikipedia page is the endpoint, not the starting point.
Once it exists and is maintained correctly, the compounding effect is significant. Every AI system that uses Wikipedia as a training or retrieval source carries your entity forward.
How to activate: identify whether your brand or founder already has enough third-party coverage to support a page. If yes, draft a neutral, sourced entry or work with someone who knows Wikipedia’s guidelines. If no, build the coverage first and revisit.
2. Vendor blog posts with original data
Generic vendor content gets retrieved and discarded at a high rate. Vendor content with original data, meaning research you ran, surveys you fielded, patterns you observed across your own client base, converts at a significantly higher rate.
The reason is straightforward. AI systems are looking for information they can’t find everywhere else. If your blog post is restating what 10 other posts already say, the model has no incentive to cite you specifically. If your post contains a finding, a ratio, a pattern, or a framework that exists only on your site, you become a primary source.
This is also one of the most accessible plays for smaller teams. You don’t need a research budget, you need to document what you’re actually seeing in your work and publish it clearly.
How to activate: look at the work you’re already doing for clients. What patterns are you noticing? What data points are you tracking that others aren’t publishing? Turn those observations into posts structured around a clear, citable finding.
3. Comparison and review pages
A Princeton GEO study found that adding citations, statistics, and authoritative voice boosted AI citation visibility by up to 40%. It’s not because comparison articles are better written but because they’re structurally easier for a model to extract from.
Comparison pages answer a specific, high-intent question in a format that maps directly to how AI systems chunk and retrieve content. They name specific entities, they make declarative statements, and they organize information in a way that makes the extraction trivial.
Comparison pages outperform pure review pages because they force specificity. A review of one product can be vague. A comparison of two products requires naming both, stating clear differences, and making a recommendation. That structure is exactly what AI systems are looking for.
How to activate: identify the comparison queries in your space. Tool A versus Tool B. Agency model versus in-house. Strategy X versus Strategy Y. Build pages that answer those questions directly and completely, with your genuine perspective, not a diplomatic both-sides treatment.
4. Niche industry publications
High-authority general publications carry domain authority. Niche industry publications carry topical authority, which is increasingly what AI systems use to determine whether a source is credible on a specific subject.
A mention in a trade publication that covers your exact industry, written for your exact audience, signals to the model that your brand is recognized within the relevant topic cluster. This is different from a generic press mention. The specificity of the publication is part of the signal.
The practical challenge is identifying which publications in your space actually carry weight with AI systems versus which ones look authoritative but aren’t indexed or trusted in ways that matter. The test is whether the publication’s content surfaces in AI answers on relevant queries. If it does, a mention there is worth pursuing.
How to activate: map the publications that already appear in AI answers on your core topics. Pursue contributed articles, expert quotes, and data citations in those specific outlets rather than spreading effort across everything.
5. Founder-led podcasts with transcripts
This is the most underestimated source type on the list and I love me a good podcast!
Audio content is not retrievable by AI systems but transcripts are.
A founder-led podcast where you’re discussing your frameworks, your observations, and your specific point of view on your industry generates something uniquely valuable when it’s transcribed and published correctly: a large volume of naturally structured, entity-rich, first-person expert content that reads as authentic rather than produced.
The reason this converts well is that podcast transcripts tend to be specific in ways that edited blog content often isn’t. You reference real examples, real tools, real scenarios. You make declarative statements without hedging them to death. You use the language of your industry naturally. All of that is exactly what AI systems are looking for when they’re deciding whether to cite a source.
How to activate: if you’re already doing a podcast, make sure every episode has a cleaned transcript published on your site as a standalone page with proper headers and structured markup. If you’re not doing a podcast, a long-form interview or Q&A format with a transcript achieves the same effect.
The right mix
You don’t need all five working simultaneously to see results. But you do need more than one because different AI systems weight different source types differently and the landscape is shifting fast enough that concentration in any single source type carries risk.
A practical starting point for most teams is to focus on vendor content with original data first because it’s fully within your control and produces compounding value quickly. Layer in comparison pages on your core queries. Then work toward the Wikipedia and niche publication plays as your third-party coverage builds.
Founder podcast infrastructure is a longer-term build but one of the highest-ceiling plays on the list if you’re willing to be consistent with it.
Where to start
The most common mistake is trying to do everything at once and doing none of it well. Pick the source type where you have the most existing material or the clearest path to producing it, execute it at a high level, and measure whether your citation rate on relevant queries improves before adding the next layer.
AI citation is not a volume game. It’s a quality and structure game. The teams that figure that out early are building an advantage that compounds every quarter.
At And Zeros, auditing AI citation presence and building the content infrastructure to improve it is a core part of what we do. If you want to know how your brand is showing up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, get in touch.
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