I ran 500 brand queries across ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity. New brands get cited 0% of the time. Full data inside.

I run research at Kre8on, where we build Kre8on platform — a tool that measures
how brands appear in AI answers. This is raw data, no pitch.

TL;DR:

• Brands <1 year old were cited 0% of the time across all 4 engines.
• The single strongest predictor of getting cited: a Wikipedia/Wikidata entry.
• llms.txt had zero measurable effect. JSON-LD schema: minimal.
• High-DA offsite mentions (3+ domains) mattered more than anything on-site.

METHOD (so you can poke holes):

• 50 brands, split by age: 0–1y, 1–3y, 3–5y, 5y+.
• 10 intent queries each (e.g. “best [category]”, “what is [brand]”, “[brand] vs [competitor]”).
• Ran across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Logged every citation
  • the source domain cited.
• n = 2,000 query-results.

THE DATA:
[Citation rate by brand age — a simple table or bar chart]
[Wikipedia presence vs. citation presence — strongest correlation]
[llms.txt on/off — no delta]

WHAT THIS MEANS:
AEO is not “SEO for AI.” You can’t schema-stuff your way into ChatGPT.
The engines are trusting third-party authority (Wikipedia, established
press) before they trust you. If you’re a new brand, your #1 job isn’t
on-page — it’s earning presence on sources the engines already cite.

Happy to answer methodology questions. I’ll drop a fuller writeup +
the tool we used in the comments.