Adding a visible human author byline with a linked /team/[name] page lifted LLM citation rates on a 40-page test set by roughly 14 percentage points within 8 weeks.
We added a 'Written by [Name], [Credential] — Reviewed by [Editor]' byline (with sameAs schema and a linked author page) to 40 client articles that previously had no byline. Citation rate across a fixed 50-query LLM basket rose from 21% to 35% over 8 weeks. Bing's IndexNow recrawl-then-rerank window appeared to drive the speed.
Methodology
Pre/post byline-addition test, 40 article URLs, 50-query LLM basket, Q1 2026.
Limits of this finding
Byline-adding pages also got light copy edits; pure byline effect is partially confounded.
More AEO findings
Removing pronoun-led sentence openings lifted LLM citation probability on our test set by a measurable margin.
We rewrote 14 high-traffic agency pages to replace 'It usually takes…' style openings with explicit subjects ('Local SEO results usually appear…'). Citation rate across a 30-query basket on ChatGPT and Perplexity rose by roughly 18 percentage points over six weeks.
A 4-bullet TL;DR placed immediately after H1 was extracted into LLM answers far more often than identical content placed mid-page.
We tested two layouts of the same content across 8 article pages: TL;DR at top vs. TL;DR after the first body section. The top-placed TL;DR was extracted in 71% of probes; the buried version in 23%.
Adding a year or version number inside a claim ('as of Q1 2026', 'on Core Update of March 2026') correlated with materially higher selection during LLM answer generation.
We added in-sentence date stamps to 22 evergreen claims across 9 articles. Of those 22 claims, 14 were quoted verbatim in subsequent ChatGPT and Claude probes. The unstamped control set (also 22 claims) had 6 verbatim quotes.
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