Your AI Citations Have a Half-Life

Welcome to The GEO Show, the briefing on Generative Engine Optimization and AI visibility. Brought to you by GEOforge. In this solo roundup, Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, covers nine stories from the week in AI search, led by Profound's new data showing that AI citations have a half-life. In this episode: - **⏳ Your AI citations have a half-life** Profound launched Citation Decay inside Answer Engine Insights. It calculates daily citation share on a rolling two-week average and tracks a URL's first citation, rise, peak, and half-life. Profound says half of the content cited by answer engines is less than 13 weeks old, which makes content refresh a major part of GEO strategy. - **💳 Ramp spend data on GEO software buyers** Ramp's September category data puts Profound at 52% purchase incidence among Ramp customers buying GEO software, followed by Peec AI at 18%, AirOps at 17%, Scrunch at 9%, and AthenaHQ at 4%. AirOps is the most switched-to vendor with a 29% competitor switch rate. The data covers anonymized spend across 70,000 businesses and is not total market share. - **🧭 Citation leaders that miss entire engines** Machine Relations analyzed 96 category leaderboards across six AI engines. Only 49 winning domains were cited by all six, 47 of 96 were absent from at least one engine, and three ranked number one despite being absent from Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. Measure visibility by engine, not in aggregate. - **🔗 40% mentioned, 0% cited in ChatGPT** MarketScale's September 28 snapshot covers 420,822 responses across 11,030 prompts, 152 projects, and five engines. In its tracked B2B sample, ChatGPT mentioned brands in 40% of responses but recorded a 0% brand-controlled citation rate. Gemini showed 25% mentions versus 12% brand citations, and Perplexity 22% versus 25%. - **🥇 Brands are AI's first choice in only 29% of answers** Leoprd analyzed 31,200 AI responses across 27 brands, seven categories, and eight platforms. On brand-agnostic recommendation questions, brands were missing in 36% of answers, mentioned but passed over in 35%, and the first choice in 29%. Only 40% of repeated tests returned the same recommendation every time, and 86% of cited sources were external to the brand's own channels. - **📍 Local AI recommendations vs Google's local rankings** Andrew Ryan Marketing sent the same local buyer query to four AI engines five times across 12 business categories in three US cities, for 720 answers. Of 673 resolvable recommended businesses, 60.5% appeared in neither Google's local 3-pack nor its organic top 10. The test ran on one day in three cities, so the figures should not be generalized. - **🛒 Google tests a Flipkart buy button in India** TechCrunch observed a limited Google experiment in India where some users see a buy button on selected Flipkart products inside Google's AI experience, opening a Flipkart-branded checkout without leaving the AI interface. Google has not announced a general rollout. - **🧩 Google replaces Gems with Gemini Skills** According to TechCrunch, Gemini Gems will migrate to Skills beginning November 17, with existing Gems converting automatically. AI experiences are becoming more modular, persistent, personalized, and agentic, which makes single-prompt monitoring less representative. - **📊 Ipsos enters AI visibility** Ipsos introduced Ipsos Synthesio AI Visibility, built with Mention Lab, combining consumer questions across the purchase journey with visibility monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other models. GEO is now reaching into market research and consumer insight budgets. Subscribe to The GEO Show wherever you get your podcasts. Full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txnL3Yuqowo 💬 Question: How often do you refresh the pages you want AI to cite?