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.
Refactor the monolithic seo-analyzer into two specialist agents
orchestrated in parallel by the /seo skill, plus a standalone /geo
skill for AI-only audits.
Changes
- agents/seo-analyzer.md: refocused on classical engines (Google, Bing,
DuckDuckGo). Adds Core Web Vitals 2.0 (LCP/INP/CLS + VSI), CSP + full
security headers, hreflang audit, video SEO (transcripts), accessibility
as ranking signal, image/video sitemaps.
- agents/geo-analyzer.md: new agent for AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude,
Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot). Covers AI crawler
policy, llms.txt/llms-full.txt, Schema.org for AI extraction (QAPage,
Speakable, Person+Article, Organization graph), entity SEO (Wikidata,
sameAs, Knowledge Panel), content shape (Definition Lead, TL;DR,
Q->A, citable stats, freshness), AI visibility testing.
- agents/resources/: shared knowledge base referenced by both agents —
ai-crawlers-2026.md (25+ bots, training vs retrieval categories,
permissive/restrictive templates), llms-txt-template.md, geo-schemas.md
(incl. deprecated list: ClaimReview, CourseInfo, etc. removed June 2025),
entity-seo.md, content-shape-for-ai.md, ai-visibility-tools.md,
automation-catalog.md.
- skills/seo/SKILL.md: becomes parallel dispatcher. Collects context
once (depth + business), spawns both agents in a single message for
concurrent execution, merges envelopes into unified SEO.md. Includes
authoritative file-ownership matrix to prevent parallel-edit races.
- skills/geo/SKILL.md: new standalone wrapper for GEO-only audits.
Scoring
- Combined score: GLOBAL = 0.80 * SEO + 0.20 * GEO (local B2C),
0.75 * SEO + 0.25 * GEO (SaaS/national/content).
- GEO axis weight raised from 5% (old) to first-class dimension.
Policy
- AI crawlers: permissive default (maximise AI citations). Restrictive
template available for premium/regulated content.
- Every user action in SEO.md section 11 must cite automation options
from automation-catalog.md.
Tools
- WebFetch + WebSearch added to allowed-tools of both skills and
both agents (needed for live CWV via PageSpeed API, AI visibility
testing, Wikidata/Knowledge Panel lookups, competitor analysis).
Research basis (2026 state of the art validated via WebSearch):
- Core Web Vitals 2.0 (VSI signal, Google core update March 2026)
- AI Overviews trigger on ~48% of Google searches
- ClaimReview + 6 other schema types deprecated June 2025
- Definition Lead Architecture (CMU KDD 2024, +impression score)
- Citations + stats add up to 40% AI visibility (Aggarwal 2024)
- Wikidata grounds every major LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity)
Backup
- agents/seo-analyzer.md.bak kept for rollback reference.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bastien Chanot