Pages cited by AI assistants more likely to answer the question up front, study finds
Pages that AI assistants cite open with a direct answer to the question more often than pages they pass over, according to an analysis of 193,507 AI answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. TJ Robertson, who runs agency TJ Digital, found that 23% of cited pages led with a direct answer, against 14% of pages the same answer surfaced but did not cite. Cited pages also beat Google Top-10 pages the AI never pulled up, at 20% versus 5%.
The study covered 4,167 questions that named no company or product, spanning 78 client companies and nine business models, captured in eight weekly snapshots between 27 August and 21 October 2026. Robertson used Peec AI to run the prompts and collect answers and their sources, then compared 21,874 cited pages with 4,507 passed-over pages. Blind raters scored 195 pairs without knowing which page had been cited.
The gap narrowed when the uncited pages were also being retrieved by the AI, and citations did not guarantee an answer: 23% of cited pages had no answer to the question in the section raters read, against half of the passed-over pages. Cited pages also scored higher on completeness, 2.3 out of 5 against 1.7, while promotional tone barely differed between the two groups.
Robertson frames the results as associations rather than proof that any page trait causes a citation. In his odds model, a year in the title more than doubled the chance of being cited, a date within the past 12 months added 88%, tables 69%, first-hand experience 45% and prices 28%. Author bylines came with 28% lower odds and calls to action 12% lower, which he says he cannot explain. Schema markup was associated with 13% higher odds, though Ahrefs testing previously found adding JSON-LD produced no significant citation lift.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Citations