GEO Score G: Metric for Web Citation

• GEO Score G is a normalized metric ranging from 0 to 1 that aggregates 16 distinct on-page quality pillars to assess citation potential.
• It evaluates features such as metadata freshness, semantic HTML, and structured data to drive content strategy and optimization.
• Empirical results indicate that achieving a GEO Score G of 0.70 or higher is strongly correlated with increased citation rates across generative search engines.

GEO Score G is a normalized metric derived from the GEO-16 framework, designed to quantify the overall quality of a web page by auditing 16 independent pillars of on-page features. The metric is specifically developed to analyze and predict the likelihood of web content being cited by AI answer engines, and is central to empirical research on citation behavior, notably as presented in the analysis of citation patterns across leading generative search engines (Kumar et al., 13 Sep 2025).

1. Definition and Mathematical Formulation

GEO Score G is defined as an aggregate, normalized quality score in the range [0, 1], computed by evaluating a set of 16 discrete quality pillars for a given web page. For each pillar $j$ ($j=1,\dots,16$), the page receives a banded pillar score $b_j(u) \in \{0,1,2,3\}$. The overall GEO score $G(u)$ is determined by:

$G(u) = \frac{1}{48} \sum_{j=1}^{16} b_j(u)$

The denominator $48$ reflects the maximum cumulative score across all pillars ($16$ pillars times $3$ points each). A related metric is the pillar hit count, where a "hit" for pillar $j$ is

$$h_j(u) = \begin{cases} 1 & b_j(u) \geq 2 \ 0 & \text{otherwise} \end{cases}$$

and the total pillar hit count $H(u) = \sum_{j=1}^{16} h_j(u)$.

2. Structure and Rationale of the GEO-16 Framework

The GEO-16 framework is an auditing protocol wherein each pillar encodes a distinct, auditable on-page feature contributing to machine interpretability, credibility, and retrievability. Although the complete list is not enumerated, the paper details several pillars most strongly associated with citation likelihood:

Pillar (Partial List)	Description
Metadata Freshness	Recency signals: human-visible timestamps, machine-readable dates
Semantic HTML	Document structure: proper use of <h1>, <h2>, <h3> for hierarchy
Structured Data	JSON-LD validity and schema markup completeness
Evidence Citations	Linking to primary or authoritative sources
Authority/Trust	Establishment of source trustworthiness
Readability, Accuracy, Media, etc.	Additional UX, factual, and content structure features

Each pillar is scored independently, allowing differentiation between pages with similar topical coverage but divergent technical and contextual attributes.

3. Empirical Associations with Citation Behavior

Analysis of 1,100 unique URLs and 1,702 citations across Brave Summary, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity demonstrates substantial stratification in mean GEO scores by engine. Key findings include:

• Brave Summary cited pages with the highest mean GEO score ($\overline{G} = 0.727$) and yielded a 78% citation rate.
• Google AI Overviews followed with a mean score of $0.687$ (72% citation rate).
• Perplexity showed notably lower mean score ($0.300$) and 45% citation rate.

Statistical modeling revealed that achieving $G \geq 0.70$ alongside $H(u) \geq 12$ correlates with a cross-engine citation rate approaching 78%. Logistic regression indicated a robust positive association between $G$ and citation likelihood, with an odds ratio of 4.2 (95% CI $[3.1, 5.7]$).

4. Diagnostic and Threshold Methodology

Threshold analysis, including use of Youden’s index ($J = \text{TPR} - \text{FPR}$), identified $G \geq 0.70$ and $H(u) \geq 12$ as balanced operating points, yielding sensitivity estimates around 78–85% and specificity in the range of 79–84%. Practical implications are:

• Pages cited in more than one engine exhibited a 71% higher mean $G$ compared to singly cited pages.
• The pillars of metadata freshness (correlation $r=0.68$), semantic HTML ($r=0.65$), and structured data ($r=0.63$) exhibit the strongest individual associations with cross-engine citation rate.

5. Implications for Content Strategy and Publisher Playbooks

The observed associations underpin actionable strategies:

• Prioritizing up-to-date, machine-readable recency data.
• Ensuring robust semantic structure through correct HTML markup.
• Implementing comprehensive and valid structured data in JSON-LD.
• Targeting $G \geq 0.70$ and $H(u) \geq 12$ as design objectives for page quality.

This operationalizes the goal of maximizing citation probability in AI answer engines, particularly in B2B SaaS verticals but plausibly generalizable to comparable knowledge markets. Diagnostic routines (e.g., pillar scoring, regression modeling) support continuous quality improvement.

6. Limitations and Generalizability

The cited paper confines itself to English-language, B2B SaaS pages and excludes off-page authority signals (e.g., domain reputation, backlink profiles). Results should be interpreted as associational and may not necessarily extend to other verticals or non-English web content. The paper suggests that systematic intervention studies (e.g., schema ablation or reference density manipulation) and expansion to multimodal content represent promising future research directions.

7. Significance for Generative Search Ecosystems

GEO Score G offers a principled, reproducible, and interpretable means for both empirical auditing and strategic optimization vis-à-vis generative search engines and AI answer engines. The metric’s structure incentivizes web publishers to align content production with the requirements of machine-centric retrieval while providing empirical researchers with a quantitative lever to analyze evolving patterns in information consumption and citation by large-scale AI systems. The standardization of such metrics underlines a broader shift toward transparency, reproducibility, and measurable quality in information discovery mediators.