# 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.

Experiment: exp-003
Status: planned
Metric: mixed
Canonical: https://geosalience.com/lab/experiments/exp-003
Window: 2026-06-14T00:00:00.000Z → 2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z
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 pages: /foundations/what-is-geo
Control pages: /technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup

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**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](/methodology). 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?](/foundations/what-is-geo) to state the core answer first, in clean standalone sentences.
- **Control:** leave [the llms.txt spec article](/technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup) 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.