Context
Two practitioner-led GEO experiments tracked 15 commercial-intent queries across multiple AI platforms and logged 775 citation events, finding that a small number of third-party placements accounted for much of the measured citation visibility.
What changed
The second experiment revised the author's earlier conclusion about owned listicles: third-party listicle placements generated most measured source mentions, while the owned listicle contributed a smaller share and took longer to receive citations.
Why it matters
The experiments provide reproducible hypotheses for Visibility OS around source selection, citation concentration, source decay, entity co-occurrence, and the difference between owned-content optimization and earned-source visibility.
Visibility OS interpretation
Visibility OS treats these results as emerging practitioner evidence rather than a general ranking rule. The strongest value is methodological: repeated queries, multi-platform tracking, citation logging, and explicit revision of a prior hypothesis.
What remains uncertain
Do these patterns reproduce across unrelated industries, non-commercial queries, geographies, logged-in versus logged-out sessions, and controlled prompt sets? How much of the observed effect comes from retrieval availability versus answer-generation citation selection?