fix(geo): I6 — every stat was real and attached to the wrong claim

Audited each statistic in agents/resources/ against primary sources after
the VSI fiction (I2) showed WebSearch launders SEO-blog consensus.

The failure mode is not invention — it is plausible recombination, which is
what a model half-remembering a search result produces:

- "Adding statistics increases AI visibility by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al.)"
  — paper real (KDD 2024), number real, SCOPE WRONG: 40% is the aggregate
  over the whole method set, domain-dependent. No per-technique figure
  exists.
- "Pages not updated quarterly are 3x more likely to lose AI citations
  (LLMRefs)" — LLMrefs' actual 3x says brand mentions correlate ~3x more
  strongly with AI visibility than backlinks. DIFFERENT SUBJECT. No source
  supports a quarterly decay multiplier.
- "QAPage cited 58% more often than Article" — uncited. Nearest real number:
  AccuraCast 2025, `Person` schema at 58.9% PREVALENCE among cited sources —
  wrong type, and its FAQPage figure (1.8%) points the opposite way to the
  claim it propped up. This one drove Tier 1 ranking.
- "62% of searches involve voice" — uncited; 62% circulates as smart-speaker
  ADOPTION. Same family as the "50% by 2020" myth ComScore denied (origin: a
  2014 Andrew Ng interview).

Corrected my own framing too: I claimed three times these stats "drive axis
weights". They do not — the weight tables carry no citations. They drive
Tier/priority recommendations and, worse, geo-analyzer's "Cite sources" rule
pushed them into CLIENT reports as research-backed.

Fixes: recommendations kept on mechanism, fabricated numbers removed with
the incident documented inline so they are not re-added. Unverified stats
(48% AI Overviews, 2.5B queries/day, Gartner -25%) labelled [UNVERIFIED]
rather than asserted or deleted — I did not check them.

Structural, not just exhortation: resources/README.md now mandates
`<claim> — <source, year, venue|vendor> — measured: <what the source ACTUALLY
measured> — <link>`. `measured:` is the field that catches this — all four
errors survive a source name; none survives stating the real measurement
next to the claim. WebSearch demoted from verification to crawler/tool-name
lookup only.

Verified: make test 35 GREEN / 0 RED.
This commit is contained in:
Bastien Chanot
2026-07-16 20:32:55 +02:00
parent e70e1d6c71
commit 9da1dec9e6
5 changed files with 123 additions and 19 deletions
+16 -6
View File
@@ -13,10 +13,13 @@ Apple Intelligence**. Google classical search is handled by the
## Context — why GEO is its own discipline in 2026
- AI Overviews trigger on ~48% of Google searches (April 2026).
- ChatGPT processes 2.5B queries/day.
- Gartner projects commercial organic search traffic to fall 25% by
end-2026 as discovery shifts to AI engines.
- `[UNVERIFIED — 2026-07-16]` AI Overviews trigger on ~48% of Google
searches (April 2026); ChatGPT processes 2.5B queries/day; Gartner
projects commercial organic search traffic to fall 25% by end-2026 as
discovery shifts to AI engines. Framing only — **never quote these to a
client** until each carries `source + measured: + link` per
`resources/README.md`. GEO is worth doing on mechanism; it does not need
these numbers to be true.
- Classical SEO ≠ GEO. Some signals overlap (headings, Schema.org)
but the optimization levers differ: entity clarity, definition
architecture, citable stats, crawler permissions.
@@ -936,8 +939,15 @@ PROCHAINE ETAPE : <highest-priority>
unknown fields → `[À COMPLÉTER]`, never a value copied from a sibling
on-site source.
- **Remove deprecated schemas rather than keep broken ones.**
- **Cite sources.** When emitting stats in the report, link
`content-shape-for-ai.md` research citations.
- **Cite sources, and only citable ones.** A stat reaches the client only
if it carries `source + measured: + link` per `resources/README.md`.
Anything marked `[UNVERIFIED]` is framing for you, never a line in the
report. Quote the source's ACTUAL measurement, never a widened or
re-subjected version of it — the 2026-07-16 audit found every stat in
that directory real but attached to the wrong claim, and this rule is
what pushed them into client deliverables as research-backed.
A recommendation that only stands up with a number you cannot source was
never standing up: make it on mechanism, or drop it.
### Process
- **Every user action lists automation options.** Mandatory from