Being quoted and being mentioned are two different things
These two outcomes are constantly confused in the industry. According to our data, they behave differently.
The technical score is linked to both outcomes, but by no means to the same extent. The effect size for being used as a source is 0.21; for being mentioned by name, it is 0.12 — roughly half that. Technical expertise opens the door to being cited. Whether AI then recommends you depends on something else.
The three figures that support the finding
All score bands with a sufficient number of companies
The distribution is flatter than that for citations: there is still an increase, but it is weaker throughout.
The table shows the 1520 for the 1652 companies. The remaining 132 (8.0 %) are distributed across score bands with fewer than 40 companies — the cells are too small to be meaningful, so they have been omitted from the table. The statistics further down, however, are calculated on the basis of all 1652.
| Technical GEO-score | Companies | Predicted the outcome | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 55 | 79 | 30 | 38.0 % |
| 60 | 136 | 53 | 39.0 % |
| 65 | 60 | 27 | 45.0 % |
| 70 | 241 | 107 | 44.4 % |
| 75 | 108 | 48 | 44.4 % |
| 80 | 73 | 35 | 47.9 % |
| 85 | 706 | 383 | 54.2 % |
| 100 | 117 | 49 | 41.9 % |
What you can use the figure for
It’s worth knowing the difference, because it tells you what technical work can and cannot do. Optimising the technical aspects makes your page crawlable and readable — it forms part of the data on which the AI bases its response. That’s a real and measurable benefit.
But being mentioned by name as a recommendation is a different matter altogether. It depends on mentions by others, reviews, directories and how clearly your business can be identified as a single entity. A tool that promises that technology alone will make you a recommended business promises more than our data supports.
What the figure doesn’t reveal
We set out the reservations on this page, not in a footnote at the bottom.
- Mentions can only be counted for companies with a name that can be uniquely identified in a text. Companies with very common names have been excluded — hence the figure of 1,652 rather than 1,912.
- Here, too, the pattern is not a straight line: the group with a top score of 100 was mentioned in 41.9 per cent of cases, which is less than the group with a score of 85.
- It is a correlation, not a cause. We check whether the company had any chance at all of being mentioned — not the size of the company or how well-known the brand already is. A large, well-known company often has both better technology and a better reputation.
- The citations are measured using Perplexity, which is the only search engine that displays actual sources. Other search engines may behave differently.
How the figure was arrived at
1652 Companies from 15 industry panels in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as measured between 2026-07-26 and 2026-08-24. The technical score is calculated deterministically without any AI assessment. The outcome is measured based on correct AI responses to unbranded questions.
The test used is the Mann-Whitney U test, with corrections for ties and continuity; this has been cross-checked against a permutation test with 10000 rounds and a fixed starting value, so that the result can be replicated.
Mann-Whitney U: z = 4.23, p = 0,000023, rank-biserial effect size 0.115. The median technical score was 85 amongst those mentioned and 80 amongst those not mentioned.
Consider both options for your business
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