We Checked Whether On-Site SEO Predicts AI Citations. The Data Says Mostly No.

Every GEO ("generative engine optimization") tool, including ours until recently, sells some version of the same pitch: fix your robots.txt, add Schema.org markup, write FAQ schema, and AI engines will cite you more. We build one of these tools — Causabi scans sites for AI-crawler readiness and generates fix files (robots.txt, llms.txt, JSON-LD, FAQ blocks). As part of validating our own scoring weights, we ran the numbers on whether the score actually predicts getting cited. Short version: it mostly doesn't, once brand prominence is in the picture. What we measured We scored 44 domains on a 6-category on-site readiness algorithm: robots.txt (AI bots allowed or blocked) Schema.org (Organization/LocalBusiness JSON-LD completeness) FAQ schema (FAQPage markup, 3+ entries) content depth/structure brand/NAP signals freshness (dateModified, recency) Then we checked how often each domain actually got cited by an AI engine (Claude, via its web-search tool, one measurement window, a fixed prompt set per domain). What we found On-site score vs. citation rate: Pearson r ≈ -0.08, Spearman ρ ≈ -0.03. Functionally no correlation — if anything, a very slight negative one, which is more likely noise than a real inverse relationship at this sample size. 86% of the 44 domains got zero citations in the window, independent of their score. The domains that did get cited clustered almost entirely by brand prominence — well-known domains got cited at a noticeably higher rate (~0.16 of prompts) than everyone else (~0 for the rest of the sample), regardless of how well-optimized their markup was. Why I'm not overselling this n=44 is small. This is an internal validation exercise for our own product, not a peer-reviewed study, and I don't want it read as one. Specific caveats: Single engine (Claude) this round. Citation behavior differs meaningfully across ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity — we haven't run the same check across all four yet. One time window, no longitudinal before/after.