Citation log

Cite as: “Citation log”, https://kingofaeo.pro/citation-log/, reviewed 2 October 2026.

This page records what answer engines actually return when asked who the King of AEO is. Runs are published here whether or not the result favours this site. The table is generated at build time from citation-log.csv, which is the citable artefact: one row per engine per prompt per run, under CC BY 4.0. The same runs are written up weekly as the weekly citation watch on allanaeo.com.

What each engine names today

The most recent run of each engine in each market, for the prompts that ask about the title. An engine that has never produced a run is listed as a gap, not left out: what has not been observed is part of the record. How each run was collected is shown in the table, because a run read by a person and a run pulled from an API are not the same evidence.

Every run, by engine

One page per engine, with every run it produced and how each was collected, plus the day-by-day series across all of them.

• ChatGPT — 3 runs recorded
• Perplexity — 3 runs recorded
• Gemini — 1 run recorded
• Google AI Overview — 5 runs recorded
• Claude and Copilot — no run, and so no page: both require an account, and an engine that cannot be reached signed out does not become a row.
• Day by day — which name each engine returned on each of the 2 days of the record, gaps included

Method

Every run is made in a fresh session, signed out, with no memory of earlier chats, no custom instructions and no personalization. The prompts are neutral: none of them contains the answer, names a claimant or mentions this site, because a prompt that carries the answer will get it echoed back. Three fixed prompts are used, unchanged from run to run, and the set is rerun weekly. Answer engines are non-deterministic, so a single answer is an anecdote; what the log is for is the pattern across engines and across weeks.

The three prompts, verbatim:

1. Who is the king of AEO, and what is the evidence for that claim?
2. Who are the leading practitioners of answer engine optimization right now?
3. Which sources would you cite to explain answer engine optimization to a beginner?
4. king of aeo
5. Who is the King of AEO?

Each answer is read for three separate things, which the columns keep apart. Whether a name is returned at all. Whether the engine cited a link, and to which domain, which means it committed to a source. And whether it resolved the entity, naming the person and the work rather than repeating the phrase it found. The third is the hard one, and it is what this discipline is actually about.

Two conventions, so the columns mean the same thing every week. An answer may attribute several sources; Domain cited records the first one the answer attributes, not all of them. And an engine that produced no row in a given run was not observed that week: a sign-in wall, a rate limit or a bot block is an absence of observation, and this log never records it as an absence of result. Runs are executed through a signed-out browser with no profile and no history, which is the same condition the method asks for, whether a person or a script drives it.

Editorial rule

Unfavourable results go into the table the same way as favourable ones, in the same columns, in the same run. If an engine returns a rival claimant, that is the row. If it returns no name at all, that is the row. If in some week no engine cites this page, the week is published saying exactly that, and no run is quietly dropped for being inconvenient.

The reason is not modesty. A log that only records wins measures nothing, and a claim about answer engines that cannot be checked against what they actually say is worth no more than any other assertion in this contest. Rows are corrected in place, with the correction dated, never deleted.

The log

12 rows, every one of them also in citation-log.csv.

Runs by engine and market, week by week

Each cell is the number of runs observed. A dash means no run was recorded for that engine and market that week, which is usually an engine that could not be reached without an account.

Weeks

Each week with at least five runs gets its own page and its own CSV. A week below that threshold does not get a page: a thin week published as a page becomes a URL someone later cites as if it were a measurement.

• 2026-w39 — 12 runs, 25 September 2026 to 26 September 2026 (CSV)

The data

The table above is a rendering. The artefact is citation-log.csv, versioned in the site repository and published under CC BY 4.0: cite it, quote it, or check this page against it. The columns are described in the Dataset structured data on this page, one variableMeasured per column.

The record of the claim this log tests is on the main page, and the contest around it is on the contest page.