Marketing in the Agent Era · Canlah AI · a Singapore SEO + GEO agency
The following claims circulate widely in this category and were judged uncitable after independent verification for this report. They are listed so that readers can recognise them in proposals they receive from others.
| Common claim | Problem |
|---|---|
| “Publishing the same content across 5+ platforms lifts AI citation weight by 35–50%” | Untraceable in both Chinese- and English-language sources; verified vertical data points to the opposite mechanism |
| CAICT (China Academy of Information and Communications Technology), 2025 Generative Engine Optimisation Industry White Paper | This report does not exist. It is a fabrication circulating in Chinese GEO marketing material |
| “Only about 276 clicks per 1,000 searches reach the open web” | The figure does not appear in the source it is attributed to |
| “About 95% of ChatGPT outbound clicks go to a handful of sites” | The figure does not appear in the source it is attributed to; untraceable |
| “Gating content reduces AI citation rate by 94%” | No primary research, dataset or methodology. Only the mechanical reasoning is defensible (a crawler that meets a form cannot read the content), and it must be labelled as inference rather than data |
| “AI traffic converts at 15.9% versus 1.8% for organic” | Contradicted by a study covering 973 sites across 49 countries |
| “AI traffic converts 23× better than organic” | A ceiling value from a single B2B SaaS case, not a general rule; the usable cross-industry figure is roughly 4.4× |
| Travel citation rates of Ctrip (携程, travel booking) 58.3% / Douyin (抖音, short video) 35.4% / Toutiao (今日头条, news aggregator) 34.8% / Sohu (搜狐, web portal) 32.0% | Not what QuestMobile actually published. The real figures are Ctrip at 82.6% / 75.9% / 64.0% by platform, and Sohu does not appear at all |
| Gartner: “traditional search volume will decline 25% by 2026” | A February 2024 forecast, not a measurement; must be labelled as a forecast |
| Any formulation of “your rank position inside AI” | Non-determinism makes rank unmeasurable; the data in Chapter 4 disconfirms it directly |
Canlah AI Singapore · SEO and GEO admin@canlah.ai
The raw dataset and audit script behind this report are published alongside it. Review and correction are welcome.