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
+11 -3
View File
@@ -4,9 +4,17 @@ Tools that track whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers
across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and Google AI
Overviews.
Context: Google AI Overviews trigger on ~48% of searches; ChatGPT
processes 2.5B queries/day; Gartner projects commercial organic
search traffic will drop 25% by 2026. Monitoring is no longer optional.
Context `[UNVERIFIED — 2026-07-16]`: Google AI Overviews trigger on ~48% of
searches; ChatGPT processes 2.5B queries/day; Gartner projects commercial
organic search traffic will drop 25% by 2026.
> Not checked against primary sources in the 2026-07-16 audit that corrected
> the rest of this directory — flagged rather than asserted or deleted, per
> the citation standard in `README.md` (rule 5). The Gartner projection at
> least names its source; the other two float. Treat all three as
> motivation, not evidence: **do NOT quote them to a client** until each
> carries `source + measured: + link`. Their only job here is to explain why
> this file exists, and that argument does not need numbers.
## Commercial tools