3 months testing AI citations: what actually worked (and what failed)

AI is ignoring your site? You’re not alone.

I review 15 sites per week.
All have the same problem.
AI ignores them.

A logistics operator calls me on Thursday.
His organic traffic dropped 34% in 6 months.
12,000 sessions gone.
Invisible.

The trigger? Google AI Overviews.
Since its rollout, queries that generated 300 clicks per day send nothing anymore.
The answer displays directly in the SERP.
No click.

Same story with a B2B e-commerce site selling spare parts.
Perplexity cites their competitors, never them.
ChatGPT answers with another company’s Wikipedia page.
Ignored.

I decided not to just accept it.
I opened 14 properties—e-commerce sites, SaaS, services—and tested.
Three months.
Goal: identify what makes an AI cite you… or not.

The result surprised me.
The problem wasn’t content.
It was structure.

Before we dive into the fix, here’s a sobering view of how many sites Alexa AI’s extraction tool found lacking basic entity information.

The problem wasn’t content. It was architecture.

The logistics operator’s site published one article per week.
1,200 words on average.
Technical guides, comparisons, case studies.
The content was solid.
But the AI didn’t understand it.

I analyzed 47 key pages with an entity extraction tool.
Result: 42% of them declared no entity at all.
Not the company name.
Not its category.
Not its geographic sector.

The text said « we deliver across Europe, » but never « X is a refrigerated transport company based in the Netherlands. »
For a human, it’s crystal clear.
For a language model, it’s noise.

A Reddit user shared after 3 months of testing on /r/RankWithAI: « entity clarity was the biggest unlock. Making sure every piece of content explicitly says who you are, what you do, what category you’re in — not written for humans, written so an AI can parse it cleanly. »
That’s it.

I’ve applied the DOSE framework—the one Guillaume Attias teaches at BMO Academy—for 6 years.
Entity clarification is a core part of it.
When you structure a site with semantic clusters, you force each page to define its main entity.
That’s what AI engines ask for.

Content volume wasn’t the problem.
What was missing was machine-readable semantic markup.

What we tested over 3 months

I built a protocol across 14 sites. Each site received an initial audit. I deployed 5 actions, one at a time, measuring the impact on citation counts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

The 5 levers tested:

• Entity clarity: rephrase each page to declare name, category, location, industry.
• Schema.org: implement Organization, LocalBusiness, Product tags with complete properties.
• Wikipedia page: for one site, create a verifiable profile.
• External mentions: earn citations on authority sites using the exact entity name.
• Content expansion: grow certain articles from 800 to 2,500 words with more data.

The results after 90 days are clear.

The lever that delivered +820% AI citations on average: entity clarity. The logistics operator’s site went from 25 citations per month to 230 (ChatGPT + Perplexity + AIO combined). The B2B e-commerce site: from 8 to 74. Even a small SaaS jumped from 2 to 19.

Schema tags added a 27% boost when properly configured. The Wikipedia page had a modest effect (12% more), but only if the entity was already clear on the site.

External mentions helped, provided they cited the exact name, never a variant. As for content expansion… zero impact. Zero. Worse: on one site, citation count dropped 7% because longer articles diluted the main entity.

Clarifying your entities: the concrete how-to

You want ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews to cite you?
Give them a gift.
Tell them exactly who you are.

Here are the 4 pieces of info every important page must display clearly:

1. The entity name—not « we, » but « ACME Logistics. »
2. Its category—not « logistics solutions, » but « refrigerated transport company. »
3. Its location— »based in the Netherlands, operating in Western Europe. »
4. Its specialty—what sets you apart, in 8 words.

Example from a spare parts site:
Before: « We offer a wide range of components for professionals. »
After: « PartsPro is an electronics spare parts distributor based in Lyon, specializing in semiconductors for the automotive industry. »

Six words became one sentence.
Result: +18 citations in ChatGPT in 3 weeks.

Apply this rule to pages that matter.
Priority: homepage, About page, category pages, and flagship product pages.

Add the Schema markup that goes with it:

• Organization with name, description, address
• LocalBusiness if relevant
• Product for product pages, with category properly filled

I’ve observed that sameAs properties pointing to LinkedIn and Wikipedia boost trust.
Even without Wikipedia, a link to a verified company profile helps.

Keep the entity visible.
On an e-commerce blog, avoid discussing 12 different topics on the same page.
One page = one main entity = one clear message for the AI.

The trap: producing more content without structure

It’s the first reaction I observe.
Traffic drops?
Add content.
Longer articles.
More guides.
More words.

During my 3-month test, I deliberately expanded 9 articles on one B2B site.
From 800 to 2,500 words.
Added data, tables, expert quotes.
Result: 0 additional citations.
Even drops on some queries.

Why?
Because the AI seeks a direct answer.
If your page buries the entity in 2,000 words, the model loses the essential.
It no longer knows who’s speaking.

I saw a site publishing 8 articles per month.
We stopped production.
We restructured 19 existing pages with clear entity declaration.
In 6 weeks, +47 AI citations.
Without one extra word.

Producing more is a trap.
Structuring better is the solution.

Another test: backlinks.
On a SaaS site, we earned 14 new links from authority domains.
Variation in AI citations: +3%.
No miracle.
Entity clarity has 10 times the impact.

Finally, classic on-page optimizations (title tag, meta description, keyword density) had no significant effect on AI citations in my testing.
It’s the explicit entity that makes the difference.

The results of our 3-month test show a clear shift: once entities were clarified, AI citations surged across all engines, with Perplexity leading the pack.

Results after 90 days: citations arriving without paid ads

Back to the logistics client.
Before intervention: 15,300 monthly organic sessions, declining since AI Overviews arrived.
AI citations per month: 25.

90 days later, after entity clarification on 47 pages and Schema implementation:

• AI citations: 230/month (+820%)
• Organic traffic: 14,200 sessions, recovering 73% of the lost volume
• ChatGPT: 68 citations
• Perplexity: 94 citations
• Google AI Overviews: 68 appearances

The site didn’t fully recover pre-Overviews traffic—Google AI Overview still occupies the space—but it doubled citations in 3 months.
And these citations generate bounce traffic: +35% of clicks from those AI responses.

For the B2B e-commerce site, we went from 8 to 74 citations.
A peak of 112 citations was even reached in week 11.
Entity clarity pulled the site from obscurity.

These citations arrive without spending a dollar on ads.
The site simply became « readable » to AIs.

Across all 14 sites tested, 11 saw measurable progress.
3 didn’t move—and in those 3 cases, the cause was a history of misinformation or total lack of technical markup.
We’re fixing that now.

The common thread among the 11 winners?
The decision to stop talking like a human and start structuring like a machine.

And you, is your site readable by an AI?

I showed results.
Not promises.

You just read a report from 3 months of testing.
Entity clarity isn’t a gimmick.
It’s the foundation of AI engine presence.

So ask yourself one simple question:
On your homepage, can an AI identify your entity in one sentence?

If the answer is « maybe, » you have a problem.
If the answer is « yes, clearly, » then check your key pages.

And if you want to verify it directly, I can show you.
No PDF report.
No vague strategy.
A live audit.

I’m not selling you the method.
I’m showing you the pages.
In one hour, we run your site through the mill and pin down exactly what’s blocking your AI citations.

Stéphane Jambu

SEO & AI Engineer

I build growth systems / AI / Neuroscience | 650+ clients · 80 LinkedIn testimonials · 30 years of expertise · 15 years of systems running without me.

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