GroundedGEO: Auditing the Evidence Gap in Generative Search Rankings

arXiv:2609.25189 · cs.IR, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-21 · Read on arXiv

cs.IR, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-21

Updated: 2026-09-21

Comments: 14 pages, 6 figures, 12 tables

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Benchmark — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Provenance — 8× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 3× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Grounding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Abstention — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Perplexity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Verifiability — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Annotator Agreement — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Verifier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
• MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset
• Evaluating Deep-Search Agents under Hierarchical Web Evidence Poisoning
• How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation
• When Optimization Becomes Manipulation: Defending Generative Search against Malicious Generative Engine Optimization
• Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines
• GEO-Bench: Benchmarking Ranking Manipulation in Generative Engine Optimization
• RankVicuna: Zero-Shot Listwise Document Reranking with Open-Source Large Language Models
• Shopping Queries Dataset: A Large-Scale ESCI Benchmark for Improving Product Search
• EcoGEO: Trajectory-Aware Evidence Ecosystems for Web-Enabled LLM Search Agents
• SCI-Defense: Defending Manipulation Attacks from Generative Engine Optimization
• Rank-without-GPT: Building GPT-Independent Listwise Rerankers on Open-Source Large Language Models

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