Disclosure first. We are Proofmend and we sell GEO work, so we have an interest in this problem existing. Treat the reasoning as the thing worth checking.
The pattern is consistent enough that we can predict the first two weeks. Someone discovers that an assistant answers a question about their product with the wrong category, an invented feature list, or occasionally a warning attached to a company that merely shares their name. They rewrite the homepage, tighten the meta description, ship a FAQ. Two weeks later they ask the same question and the answer has not moved a word.
The rewrite was aimed at the wrong document. The sentence that was wrong did not come from the site.
Your own domain sets the record, not the answer
In our Chinese-market dataset of 187,818 deduplicated citations, domains owned by the company being discussed account for 1.37% of all citations. Your own pages govern whether an assistant that has already decided to talk about you gets the details right. Whether it mentions you at all, and which paragraph it lifts, is decided on pages you do not control.
So the first move is not writing. It is reading the citation list attached to the wrong answer, and working out which of these four things went wrong, because the repair is different in each case.
| Failure mode | What it looks like | Where the repair happens |
|---|---|---|
| Name collision | Another company or app with the same or a similar name gets merged into your paragraph, sometimes carrying its reviews | Publish checkable distinguishers, legal entity, launch date, category, in more than one place, consistently worded |
| Miscategorisation | You get filed next to an adjacent category and the feature list is guessed | One extractable sentence defining what the product does, repeated identically across the sources that get cited |
| Stale facts | Old pricing, an old name, a feature you retired | Find the specific cited pages and update them one by one, the cheapest of the four |
| Hostile third-party source | A rating site, complaint page or news story is quoted directly | Platform correction procedures, and fixing the underlying issue first. No amount of published content outranks a cited verdict page |
The last row is the one people argue with. We have watched an assistant answer a question about whether a company is trustworthy by quoting a site-rating service and a general news story about scams in that category. Nothing you publish on your own domain enters that answer.
A repair run, in order
- Fix the baseline before touching anything. Record the question text, the engine, the mode, the timestamp and the full answer with its source list. Ask the same question at least twice across separate sessions. Without two rounds you cannot tell a repair from ordinary drift, and these systems drift on their own.
- Classify the citation list against the table above. Most answers expose their sources; group the domains by row.
- Correct your own record. Key facts must be present in the served HTML rather than appearing only after client-side rendering. This step earns no citations. It makes sure that when you do get quoted, the quote is right.
- Repair the cited layer. Go to the specific page types the answer actually quoted and align the wording. Consistency beats polish. When several sources disagree, an engine picks whichever reading looks most like consensus.
- Re-test under the baseline conditions and archive the result. Same question, same engine, same mode. Log what changed and when, and log anything untested as unknown with no estimate.
What shape to give the corrected pages
Once you know which pages need rewriting, the format matters more than the length. Ranked by the lift we measure, a cited source is worth about +115.1%, a stated numeric fact +61.6%, a definition block +57.3%, a comparison table +55.3%, and a clear procedure +41.2%. High-scoring pages in that dataset averaged 1,943 words against 170 for low scorers, which makes length a floor rather than a target.
An assistant composing an answer lifts units it can take whole. Prose with no extractable unit inside it gives it nothing to lift, however well argued.
What this process cannot promise
Publishing is not indexing, indexing is not retrieval, retrieval is not a mention, and a mention is not a citation. Each state needs its own evidence, and a screenshot establishes none of them.
Proofmend does not guarantee rankings, AI mentions or citations, traffic, leads, or revenue. Correcting your record changes what an engine can find and quote. What it does with that is decided on the platform side, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you an outcome they do not control.
Our method and evidence rules are published at https://proofmend.com/method/ , engagement scope and prices at https://proofmend.com/pricing/ , and commercial terms at https://proofmend.com/terms/ . Figures come from our own August 2026 sampling and dataset work and move over time. Materials checked August 25, 2026.
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