Does an answer-first opening change how often we're cited?
Sharpen one article's first 80 words into a clean, extractable answer; hold a comparable article's opening unchanged; watch what moves. Proposed — and honest up front that our current instrumentation can't fully measure the thing this targets.
- Hypothesis
- Rewriting an article's opening so the core answer is stated first, in standalone quotable sentences, increases the chance an LLM extracts and cites it — visible as more crawler re-fetches of the treatment page and, weakly, in site-wide citation movement.
- What changed
- Treatment article's first paragraph is rewritten answer-first: the key takeaway in 1–2 standalone sentences, no throat-clearing, dense with concrete dated facts. Control article's opening is left unchanged. Body below the fold is untouched on both.
- Treatment
- Metric
- Mixed
- Window
- proposed 14 June 2026 → 14 July 2026
Status: proposed. Nothing has been rewritten. The dates above are proposed. The editor picks the experiment and confirms the pairing.
The question
If we open an article with the answer instead of a wind-up, do LLMs cite it more? Answer-first structure is the most repeated piece of GEO advice — including in our own playbook. Before we keep repeating it, we should test it on a page we control.
Proposed design
- Treatment: rewrite the first paragraph of What is GEO? to state the core answer first, in clean standalone sentences.
- Control: leave the llms.txt spec article opening unchanged.
- Window: 14 days before, 30-day review after.
The honest catch
This experiment targets citation, and our citation harness measures the whole domain, not a single page. So we cannot cleanly answer "did this rewrite get this page cited more." The analyzer will say so: for a page-level citation question on site-wide data, it returns inconclusive and attaches only the site-wide trend as context.
What we can measure per page is crawler re-fetch frequency — a proxy for "the bots noticed a change worth re-reading." We treat that as the readable signal and are explicit that it is a proxy. Properly measuring per-page citation would require parsing the harness's raw per-prompt sources for this URL — a future upgrade this experiment helps justify.
What would count as a result
A sustained rise in crawler re-fetches of the treatment page that the control does not share, ideally alongside (not proven by) a site-wide citation uptick. We will not claim the rewrite "raised citations" on site-wide data alone.
Analysis readout
This experiment has not started. Once it runs and the crawler/citation data accrue, the before/after readout appears here and updates as results land.
Limitations
- The primary intended outcome — citation/extraction of this specific page — is NOT page-attributable with our current harness, which measures the whole site. We can only use crawler re-fetch frequency as a proxy and treat citation movement as site-wide context.
- A dek rewrite is a content improvement we'd want anyway, so a 'null' crawl result does not mean the rewrite was pointless — only that it didn't move the proxy metric.
- Single domain, single matched pair. Page type differs (explainer vs how-to).
- Must not overlap with exp-002 on the same pages in the same window — running both at once would confound each other.
Changelog
- Published — 31 May 2026
Raw markdown: /lab/experiments/exp-003.md