I ran 500 brand queries across ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity. New brands get cited 0% of the time. Full data inside.

A developer at Kre8on ran 500 brand queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, finding that new brands are cited 0% of the time. The research shows a strong correlation between Wikipedia presence and AI citation, while on-page tactics like schema markup and llms.txt have no effect. The findings suggest that brand visibility in AI answers depends on third-party authority, not SEO optimization.

I run research at Kre8on, where we build Kre8on platform — a tool that measures how brands appear in AI answers. This is raw data, no pitch. TL;DR: METHOD so you can poke holes : THE DATA: Citation rate by brand age — a simple table or bar chart Wikipedia presence vs. citation presence — strongest correlation llms.txt on/off — no delta WHAT THIS MEANS: AEO is not "SEO for AI." You can't schema-stuff your way into ChatGPT. The engines are trusting third-party authority Wikipedia, established press before they trust you. If you're a new brand, your 1 job isn't on-page — it's earning presence on sources the engines already cite. Happy to answer methodology questions. I'll drop a fuller writeup + the tool we used in the comments.