How have click-through rates changed since AI Overviews appeared? Which websites does ChatGPT cite most often? How do query fanout, RAG, and other AI search complexities actually work?
Research is how you answer these questions, and how you keep up with what’s changing in AI search. These are the 25 people publishing the most original research on AI search, and the ones worth following.
How I compiled this list
I started with a longlist of 87 names: people widely recommended as AEO and GEO experts, and researchers at AI visibility companies.
Then I counted how many original AI search studies each person has published. I pulled every page published on each person’s main publishing sites since 2023 (more than 17,000 pages), checked each one against the criteria below, and checked who was credited. Where the same study appeared in more than one place, such as a cross-post, translation or update, I counted it once.
A page counted as a study if it met four tests:
- Original data. The author or their team collected or analyzed it themselves, such as prompts run through AI assistants, AI Overview results, citation datasets, analytics, server logs, surveys or controlled experiments.
- About AI search. How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, AI Overviews or AI Mode find, cite and recommend content, the traffic they send, or how people use them to search.
- A meaningful sample. Roughly 50+ prompts, queries or pages; analytics from 10+ websites; 100+ survey respondents; or a controlled experiment with a described setup.
- A published write-up. An article, report or paper published between January 2023 and November 2026.
People only got credit for studies carrying their byline, or that name them as a co-author or as the analyst behind the data. Company research with no named author didn’t count toward anyone.
I ranked by number of studies, and broke ties by the number of websites linking to those studies.
The top 25 AEO/GEO experts
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Data-driven LLM citation and AI search behavior |
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AI search citations and click impact |
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AI grounding and citation mechanics |
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Data-driven AI search citation research |
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Large-scale AI citation and visibility data |
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Reverse-engineering AI search citation and retrieval behavior |
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Large-scale LLM citation behavior research |
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AI citation behavior across answer engines |
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Large-scale AI Overviews and AI citation studies |
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Data-driven AI search citation and traffic research |
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AI citations vs organic rankings |
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