GEO Case Study: Two of Our Guides Cited in Google's AI Overviews

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making your pages easy for AI tools to find, trust and quote. It is easy to talk about and hard to prove, so this is a small, checkable example from our own site.

Quick answer: on 24 September 2026, Google’s AI Overviews in the UK cited two of our guides: our Copyleaks review for “is copyleaks accurate” and our QuillBot AI detector guide for “quillbot ai detector”. Both pages open with a short, direct answer backed by numbers. The citations brought visibility but very few clicks: one click from 680 impressions for “quillbot ai detector” over 90 days.

What we found

We checked both searches on Google UK (desktop) on 24 September 2026, using DataForSEO’s live search results, which list the sources each AI Overview links to.

Search	UK searches a month	Our page	How the AI Overview used it	Our page in the ten organic results?
is copyleaks accurate	50	Copyleaks review	The only source for the overview’s opening sentence, and cited three times in all	No
quillbot ai detector	12,100	QuillBot AI detector guide	One of seven sources, in the part of the answer about accuracy	No

Search volumes are Google Ads averages for the UK over the last 12 months.

Two things stand out. First, neither page was in the ten organic results under the overview on the day we checked, yet both were quoted in the answer above them. Being cited and ranking are related, but they are not the same thing.

Second, the Copyleaks overview opens by describing the tool as “highly accurate for exact-match plagiarism and raw, unedited AI text”, before saying where it falls short. That closely follows the answer we give in our own FAQ:

Plagiarism detection is highly accurate for exact matches and strong for paraphrased content. AI detection is reliable for unedited AI-generated text but less accurate for edited content or mixed human/AI writing. No detection tool is 100% accurate.

What we changed a week earlier

On 17 September we made three small changes to these pages:

• A quick answer near the top of each page. Two or three sentences that answer the question in the title, using figures already on the page. The preview text Google attaches to our QuillBot guide in the overview is taken from that quick answer.
• A title that asks the question people search. The QuillBot guide’s title now asks whether the detector is accurate, which is the question the page was already being found for.
• A clearer heading on the Copyleaks review. Its title and main heading now lead with “Copyleaks AI Detector”. The FAQ answer the overview draws on was already there.

What we can’t claim

It would be easy to write “we added quick answers and Google started citing us”. We can’t show that.

• We don’t know what happened before 17 September. The only earlier snapshot we have, from 13 July, shows an AI Overview for “is copyleaks accurate” but not which sources it linked to. Either page may have been cited before the changes.
• One check is a snapshot. AI Overviews change between searches and from day to day. A single result shows the pages can be cited, not that they always are. We will re-run the same searches and record the sources each time.
• Citations have brought few clicks. Over the 90 days to 23 September, Search Console recorded 680 impressions and one click for “quillbot ai detector”, and 44 impressions and one click for “is copyleaks accurate”. Across all searches, the Copyleaks review earned 36 clicks from 3,532 impressions and the QuillBot guide 9 clicks from 2,497.
• Our link was seen in a small share of searches. “quillbot ai detector” averages 12,100 UK searches a month and was still around 5,400 in July and August, but our page was seen 680 times in 90 days.

What this suggests if you want to be cited

These are patterns from two pages, not rules.

1. Answer the question in the first few lines. State the answer, then the numbers behind it. Both cited passages are short, specific and easy to lift into an answer.
2. Use the words people search. “Is Copyleaks accurate?” is both a heading on our page and the search that cited it.
3. Say where things fall short. Both cited passages give a balanced view: what the tool does well and where it struggles.
4. Keep the page easy to read for machines as well as people. Plain text rather than images, clear headings, and an FAQ that answers one question per answer.
5. Measure citations separately from rankings and clicks. A page can be quoted without ranking in the top ten, and quoted without being clicked. If you only watch rankings and traffic, you will miss both.

How we will track it

We will re-run both searches, and related ones such as “how accurate is copyleaks” and “is quillbot ai detector accurate”, and record every source the overview cites. If the citations hold, spread or disappear, we will update this post with what changed.

If you want to know what AI answers say about your business and which sources they rely on, our AI search visibility work runs the same checks for you, as part of SEO and AI search.