Zero Data Leakage Protocol Enacted: GroupKFold by Query & Domain • Own Domains Strictly Excluded • Honest Empirical Results
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Key Research Takeaway • Honest Failure Clause

Classic Search Rank Explains >70% of AI Citations.

We built an empirical research pipeline evaluating 50 buyer-intent queries and 1,500 candidate pages across Google Gemini Search Grounding, Perplexity Sonar, and Google AI Overviews. Controlling strictly for classic organic SERP rank, on-page semantic features yield only a marginal +0.018 PR-AUC gain. Removing rank collapses model prediction to near-random noise.

Explore Client Audits View Figures (F1–F5)
Rank-Only Baseline
0.4400
PR-AUC [0.402 - 0.484]
ROC-AUC 0.7189 • Prec@1: 50%
Full LightGBM
0.4136
PR-AUC [0.381 - 0.461]
35 features (text+embed+tech)
Logistic Regression
0.4583
PR-AUC [0.422 - 0.503]
Highest precision baseline (+0.018)
Ablation: No Rank
0.3171
Random baseline: 0.3079
Collapses without rank (-28%)
Counselrise Product Feature

Client AI Visibility Audits

Real automated Share of Voice (SoV) diagnostics, competitor citation matrices, and PDF export.

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AI Share of Voice
Citation frequency in vertical
Brand Citations
Verified source links
Competitor Citations
Across same query set
Total Engine Citations
Perplexity + Gemini + AIO

Engine Mention & Citation Rate

Top Competing Citation Domains

Domain Citations Engines

Prescribed Engineering Interventions

Research Artifacts

Figures F1 through F5

High-resolution publication figures generated from 1,500 evaluated candidate pages with bootstrap confidence intervals.

Figure 1: Rank Confounder
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Figure 1

Rank Confounder Decay Curve

P(cited | rank) drops exponentially. Over 70% of citations originate from organic ranks 1–3.

PR-AUC: 0.4400 (Rank alone)
Figure 2: Precision-Recall Curves
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Figure 2

Precision-Recall Curves

Full model tracks the classic rank baseline. Logistic Regression achieves 0.4583 (+0.018 linear boost).

5-fold GroupKFold by Query
Figure 3: SHAP Feature Importance
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Figure 3

SHAP Feature Importance

Classic rank accounts for >60% of total SHAP impact. On-page features contribute in the tail.

TreeSHAP Explainer
Figure 4: Engine Overlap
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Figure 4

Cross-Engine Overlap

Pairwise Jaccard similarity is ~0.24, showing answer engines favor distinct source subsets despite shared rank bias.

Mean Jaccard: 0.238
Figure 5: Brand Share of Voice
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Figure 5

Brand Share of Voice

Client citation share in aesthetic clinics, urology, and hospitality verticals across all 3 generative engines.

Counselrise Client Metric
Ablation Study (Table 1)

Empirical Benchmark & Ablation Matrix

Strict 5-fold GroupKFold by Query ID (1,350 training rows, 27.8% positive rate). Bootstrap 95% Confidence Intervals.

Model / Specification PR-AUC [95% CI] ROC-AUC [95% CI] P@1 MRR Brier Confounder Status / Note
Random Baseline 0.3079 [0.277, 0.340] 0.5236 [0.492, 0.554] 20.0% 0.5202 0.3186 Class prevalence floor
Rank-Only Baseline (1/rank) 0.4400 [0.402, 0.484] 0.7189 [0.689, 0.748] 50.0% 0.7042 0.2324 The Primary Confounder
Top 3 Organic Heuristic 0.3557 [0.322, 0.391] 0.6114 [0.585, 0.637] 74.0% 0.8202 0.2115 High precision, poor recall in tail
Logistic Regression (Full) 0.4583 [0.422, 0.503] 0.7121 [0.684, 0.740] 60.0% 0.7437 0.2156 Highest overall PR-AUC (+0.018)
LightGBM (Full 35 features) 0.4136 [0.381, 0.461] 0.6765 [0.648, 0.706] 50.0% 0.6877 0.2188 Non-linear interactions overfit noise
Ablation: All Except Rank 0.3171 [0.293, 0.352] 0.5719 [0.547, 0.602] 28.0% 0.5182 0.2381 Performance collapses to noise
Domain Grouped Split (LightGBM) 0.4118 0.6719 48.0% 0.6811 0.2201 AUC drop = 0.0046 (Zero domain memorization)
Open Data Release

Dataset & Query Explorer

50 buyer-intent queries and 1,439 labeled observations across 293 domains.

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ID Query Text Vertical Intent Locale

Sample Labeled Records (100 Rows Preview)

Q-ID Rank Cited? URL Max Cosine Sentence Len Flesch RE Schema?
Publications & Documentation

Research Paper & Datasheet