u/ywinsntrnp

Here's an AEO experiment I'd really like to see done properly.
Take one factual claim that appears on 20 different websites.
Same underlying information.
But the pages have completely different characteristics.
One has the original source.
One has stronger domain authority.
One was updated yesterday.
One explains the claim more clearly.
One uses structured data.
One has a named expert author.
One has the shortest, cleanest answer.
One has dozens of backlinks.
Then ask AI systems questions where that specific fact is needed.
Which page actually gets cited?
I've been thinking about this while working on Cited Logic because citation analysis gets complicated very quickly once multiple sources are saying essentially the same thing.
It's tempting to say "authority wins," but I'm not convinced it's that simple.
The interesting part would be repeating the experiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and seeing whether they consistently prefer the same source.
My guess is they wouldn't.
Has anyone seen research that isolates individual citation factors like this?
I'd love to compare results.

Been trying to audit this properly and it is harder than I expected.

The pattern I keep hitting: the answer is roughly right, the citation is a real page, and the specific claim is nowhere in that page. It borrowed the credibility of the link without taking the fact from it.

What I do now is dumb but it works better than nothing. I take the sentence carrying the number or the claim, and search the cited page for that exact figure. If it is not there verbatim or as an obvious paraphrase, I treat the citation as decorative.

That still misses the case where the page did say it once and has since been edited. No idea how to catch that without archiving everything.

Curious what other people use. Is anyone checking this at scale rather than one answer at a time?

What happens when multiple websites make the same claim—which one does AI cite?

How do you actually check that an AI answer used the source it cites?