Your ChatGPT Referrals Grew 5×. How Much Came From AEO?
A 2026 natural experiment separates raw ChatGPT referral growth from the platform tailwind with an on-domain control.
From this desk
Start with the most useful page
The featured page offers a strong introduction. The remaining cards help readers move through this editorial section without turning the archive into a service menu.
Read the featured method
Compare page representations without changing the task
Use a preregistered protocol to compare accessibility trees, HTML, rendered pages, and screenshots while keeping tasks and scoring consistent.
Protocols
Plan the test before seeing the result
Declare the question, sample, environment, measures, exclusions, and stopping rule before interpretation begins.
Experiments
Change one material variable
Preserve the baseline, observation window, confounders, and decision rule so a result remains inspectable.
Evidence
Keep every claim close to support
Classify facts, observations, interpretations, recommendations, and opinions before drafting conclusions.
Latest research
Methods, tests, and evidence reviews
Each article states the method, retained evidence, unresolved limits, and the boundary on what the result can establish.
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Do Google Business Profile Posts Increase Actions? A Matched-Weekday Test Protocol
A preregistered local test for comparing matched weekdays with and without Business Profile posts while preserving calls, clicks, directions and confounders. Results pending.
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Does ChatGPT Rely on Capterra? A SaaS Source-Frequency Test Protocol
A preregistered test separating mentions, citations, recommendations, and referrals across bounded SaaS recommendation tasks. Results pending.
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Do First-Party Review Pages Change AI Answers? Test Protocol
A consent-based experiment for testing whether a crawlable first-party review page is retrieved or reflected in repeated AI answers. Results pending.
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Page Weight vs Extractable Text: A 25-Site Audit Protocol
A preregistered 25-page protocol for comparing transfer size, raw HTML, server-extractable text, rendered text, composition, and main-content density. Results pending.
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Accessibility Tree vs HTML vs Screenshot: Which Page Representation Helps an AI Agent?
A preregistered protocol for comparing accessibility-tree, static HTML, rendered HTML, and screenshot representations on identical browser-agent tasks.
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Perplexity DeepSeek V4 Flash: A Routing and Retrieval Test Protocol
A preregistered test for DeepSeek V4 Flash through Perplexity model-gateway and agent routes, with identical inputs and separate retrieval, citation, latency, and quality fields.
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GPT-5.6 Fast Mode Above 272K Tokens: A Latency-Cost Test Protocol
A preregistered protocol for comparing GPT-5.6 Fast and standard service above 272K input tokens across latency, cost, errors, and task quality.
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Do AI Answers Cite YouTube Videos Outside Google’s Top 100? A Test Protocol
A preregistered protocol for comparing AI-answer video citations with Google’s top 100 web results without turning a vendor claim into a universal search rule.
A useful standard
How to read SearchEngineAnswer research
A useful study makes its conditions visible. Treat each result as evidence within a declared sample and environment, not as a universal platform rule.
Method before conclusion
The question, inputs, environment, measures, and stopping rule should be understandable before the result is interpreted.
Failures stay in the record
Timeouts, absent results, rejected cases, and contradictory observations are data, not material to hide.
Limits remain visible
A measured association or one platform observation does not automatically establish causation or a permanent ranking rule.
References and next steps