GEO advice in 2025 told you to optimise your own site. Original research across 12 brands and 5 LLMs shows that's exactly where the signal matters least. Over 80% of the citations that drive AI recommendations come from third-party sources — not your content.
This talk presents joint research with João da Silva (FrictionAI) comparing Knowledge Graph scores against recommendation rates across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The findings are counterintuitive: a higher KG score doesn't guarantee recommendation. New Balance has the highest KG score in the dataset, perfect recognition across all LLMs, and near-zero athleisure recommendation. Lululemon has a fraction of the KG score and dominates the category.
The difference isn't visibility. It's the three graphs — entity, document, concept — and the four signals that determine whether a brand gets selected: clarity, relevance, credibility, extractability.
Google ranks pages. AI selects entities. If you're still optimising only for one, you're playing the wrong game.