What 54 Studies Say Actually Drives AI Citations: Brand Mentions Beat Backlinks 3 to 1
A late-June meta-analysis by Cyrus Shepard on Zyppy Signal aggregated 54 AI-citation studies. Brand web mentions correlate about 3x more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks, AI-cited content runs 25.7% fresher than organic top-10 results, and 76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages were updated within 30 days. Meanwhile the overlap between Google's top 10 and AI citations has collapsed to 17-38%. Here is what that evidence means for a small store's roadmap.