Hello Reader!

Are we back to the old content playbook?
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Maybe.

A new Grow and Convert study looked at 15,000 AI answers for a B2B software client across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Perplexity.
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They found that 85% of citations came from third-party content.
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But that did NOT mean third-party content was the biggest driver of brand mentions.
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Of the 7,779 answers that mentioned the client, 87% had the client’s own site in the sources.
When the client’s own site was cited, the brand was mentioned:

• 90% of the time in AI Overviews
• 89% in Gemini
• 89% in AI Mode
• 73% in ChatGPT
• 51% in Perplexity

When a third-party page mentioning the client was cited instead, the mention rates were dramatically lower on most platforms.
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Their conclusion? The strongest predictor of a brand mention wasn’t whether other sites talked about the company.
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It was whether the company had a page that matched the prompt closely enough to get retrieved.
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So maybe the order of operations for GEO means doing what we’ve been doing all along:
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Create strong owned content around the topics and prompts you want to own.
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Then go get the third-party mentions, Reddit conversations, creator coverage, and listicle inclusion.

Full study here.​

Thanks for being here!

​Ashley​

Partner

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