The claim
Specific, sourced and quotable statements make a page more visible inside AI-generated answers than keyword-led rewriting does.
What the evidence shows
Aggarwal et al. built GEO-bench, a benchmark of about 10,000 queries, and tested how content changes affect a source's visibility in generative engine responses. The abstract reports that "GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses." The best-performing methods were Cite Sources, Quotation Addition and Statistics Addition; keyword stuffing performed poorly. On Perplexity.ai, Quotation Addition improved position-adjusted word count by about 22% and Statistics Addition improved subjective impression by up to 37%. Lower-ranked sources gained more than top-ranked ones. The study measured visibility within generated answers, not buyer choice, and the "up to" figures are best cases.