# GEO content levers: statistics, expert quotes, cited sources

**Confidence: [M]** (Princeton GEO, KDD 2024 — direction replicated on
production engines by multiple 2025-26 practitioner studies; exact
percentages are benchmark-conditional)

Of 9 interventions tested, the winners for AI citation/visibility:
**adding statistics (~+40%)**, **direct quotes from named sources (~+28%)**,
**citing authoritative sources (+30-40%)**. Keyword stuffing measured
neutral-to-**negative**. Fluency improvements also helped (~+29%).

**How to apply:** every content brief should require: concrete numbers with
sources, at least one named-expert quote, outbound citations to primary
sources, and extractable facts (dates, named entities). This composes with
[[chunk-shape]] — the stats/quotes need to live inside self-contained
sections to be retrieved.

**Evidence:** Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 (Princeton GEO) ·
https://seenrank.com/blog/the-princeton-geo-study-explained-for-marketers/ ·
https://sunilpratapsingh.com/guides/geo/what-research-says-about-generative-engine-optimization
