Tim Hey

The trust gap nobody is closing

Everyone racing to make their site "AI-ready" is perfecting the thing that matters least. The data says so, and almost nobody is acting on it.

Start with the research. Princeton's GEO study and the GEO-16 citation work landed on the same finding: generative engines weight independent earned media and routinely drop vendor-owned pages. Your perfect llms.txt can still go uncited.

The citation map shows why. Within ChatGPT's top-10 cited sources, Wikipedia alone is roughly 48%. Agents do not roam the open web and find you. They pull from a short list of sources they already trust. As Carolyn Shelby puts it, AI does not discover new brands, it selects from known entities.

That splits agentic GTM into two jobs, and they are not the same.

  • Stock your own shelf. llms.txt, markdown mirrors, structured docs, clean JSON-LD. Make yourself extractable.
  • Earn corroboration. Get mentioned by the sources the model already trusts.

Everyone is pouring effort into the first. Almost no one is working the second.

My read: the shelf is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. If the trusted sources never mention you, "extractable" just means an agent can read a page it will never be sent to.

I should be honest about the limit of this very page. A personal site is less vendor than a corporate domain, but it is still self-published. It upgrades my named-operator surface. It is not third-party corroboration, and it does not replace a citation from Wikipedia, the press, or a peer with no stake in me.

So the unclaimed move in agentic GTM is not better on-page markup. It is earned third-party presence, run and measured like a real channel. That is the gap I am watching.

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