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
+24 -4
View File
@@ -21,8 +21,20 @@ existing instances. They no longer produce rich results.
### QAPage — single Q&A format
Pages cited 58% more often by ChatGPT vs basic Article schema.
Use when the page is built around ONE primary question.
Use when the page is built around ONE primary question. Emitting the type
that matches the content shape beats wrapping everything in a generic
`Article`.
> **No lift figure here — the one that lived here was wrong.** Until
> 2026-07-16 this read "Pages cited 58% more often by ChatGPT vs basic
> Article schema", uncited. Nothing supports it. The nearest real number is
> AccuraCast 2025 (~2,000 prompts across ChatGPT / AI Overviews /
> Perplexity, ~9,000 cited sources): **`Person` schema appeared in 58.9%**
> of cited sources — a *prevalence* count for a *different type* — while
> **`FAQPage` appeared in 1.8%**, which points the opposite way to the claim
> it was propping up. Q&A shape is still worth doing on genuinely
> single-question pages; it is not worth a fabricated number. Do NOT quote a
> QAPage lift % to a client — there isn't one.
```json
{
@@ -81,8 +93,16 @@ visible content.
### Speakable — voice + AI extraction marker
62% of searches in 2026 involve voice. Speakable flags the passage
best suited for voice readout and AI summary.
Speakable flags the passage best suited for voice readout and AI summary.
> **No voice-share figure — the one that lived here was a conflation.**
> Until 2026-07-16 this read "62% of searches in 2026 involve voice",
> uncited. No primary source carries it; 62% circulates as a *smart-speaker
> adoption* number, not a share of searches. It is the same family as the
> "50% of searches will be voice by 2020" myth — attributed to ComScore,
> who **denied it**; the real origin is a 2014 Andrew Ng interview. Speakable
> is cheap and harmless, so keep recommending it on TL;DR / summary blocks —
> but justify it by extraction shape, never by a voice-share statistic.
```json
{