Is 3rd party data the biggest lever in GEO? Our data says no.

Everyone says third-party content is the biggest lever in GEO. Get on listicles, get on Reddit, etc,. So we decided to research this… is that actually what’s most important?

Turns out it’s not. 85% of what LLMs cite from IS third party content, but that’s NOT what determines whether a brand gets mentioned. So drawing a conclusion that says third party content is most important because it’s largely what LLMs look at is wrong.

We looked at 15,000 AI answers for a B2B software client. 112 prompts, 24 topics, 52 weekly runs each, across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Perplexity.

For every answer we logged what articles the LLMs cited and whether it mentioned the client. 85% of the citations were third-party pages. So yes, that’s what the engines read.

But of the 7,779 answers that mentioned the client, 87% had the client’s own site in the sources. When the client’s own site was cited, it got mentioned:

• 90% of the time on AI Overviews
• 89% on Gemini
• 89% on AI Mode
• 73% on ChatGPT
• 51% on Perplexity

When a third-party page that includes the client was cited instead:

• 25% on AI Overviews
• 25% on Gemini
• 5% on AI Mode
• 6% on ChatGPT
• 28% on Perplexity

The client is absent from 66 of the 70 pages the engines cite most in its category and still gets mentioned in 51% of all answers, because its own pages get cited.

Third-party presence in AI citations turned out not to be a prerequisite in getting mentioned.

Topic by topic it’s the same. Where the client’s site is cited in 88% of runs, it’s mentioned in 79%. Where it’s cited in 44%, it’s mentioned in 25%.

The thing that predicts a mention isn’t whether other sites talk about you. It’s whether you have a page that matches the prompt closely enough to get retrieved.

We still believe 3rd party mentions are important, but our belief is that you should produce content on your own site first that closely matches the topic areas you’re trying to own, and then go get 3rd party mentions afterwards.

Note: The data can change by company, the industry, type of business, competitiveness, etc., so we’ll continue to publish more studies on this. Also as you can see here, each LLM works slightly differently.