# Does an answer-first opening change how often we're cited?

> Sharpen one article's opening into a clean, extractable answer; hold a comparable article's opening unchanged; watch what moves. Running since 2026-06-08 — and honest up front that our current instrumentation can't fully measure the thing this targets.

Experiment: exp-003
Status: running
Metric: mixed
Canonical: https://geosalience.com/lab/experiments/exp-003
Window: 2026-06-08T00:00:00.000Z → 2026-07-08T00:00:00.000Z
Hypothesis: Rewriting an article's opening so the core answer is stated first, in standalone quotable sentences, increases the chance an LLM extracts and cites it — visible as more crawler re-fetches of the treatment page and, weakly, in site-wide citation movement.
What changed: Treatment article's first paragraph is rewritten answer-first: the key takeaway in 1–2 standalone sentences, no throat-clearing, dense with concrete dated facts. Control article's opening is left unchanged. Body below the fold is untouched on both.
Treatment pages: /technical/json-ld-recipes
Control pages: /technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup

---
**Status: running since 2026-06-08; review 2026-07-08.** The editor selected and paired this experiment. The treatment page's opening has been rewritten answer-first; the control page is held byte-for-byte unchanged for the window.

## The question

If we open an article with the answer instead of a wind-up, do LLMs cite it more? Answer-first structure is the most repeated piece of GEO advice — including in our own [playbook](/methodology). Before we keep repeating it, we test it on a page we control.

## The design

- **Treatment:** the opening of [JSON-LD recipes for GEO](/technical/json-ld-recipes) was rewritten to state the core answer first, in clean standalone sentences — replacing a soft "you don't need to remember the whole spec" lead-in. The body below the fold is untouched.
- **Control:** [the llms.txt spec article](/technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup) opening is left unchanged.
- **Primary metric:** AI-crawler re-fetch frequency per page (free, page-level), treatment vs control.
- **Window:** the before window is whatever per-page crawl history exists (short — tracking began ~2026-05-31); the review is 2026-07-08.

## Why these two pages

Both are technical articles, so page *type* is held roughly constant. They differ in kind — the treatment is a spoke recipe page, the control a cornerstone audit — which is disclosed as a residual confounder, as is a minor co-intervention: the treatment gained a new inbound link from the just-published geo-methods-taxonomy on the same day. Both are disclosed above; on this short, near-zero before-window the honest expectation is an early inconclusive.

## The honest catch (and the parked half)

This experiment targets *citation*, and our citation harness measures the whole domain, not a single page. So we cannot cleanly answer "did this rewrite get *this page* cited more." The analyzer says so: for a page-level citation question on site-wide data, it returns **inconclusive** and attaches only the site-wide trend as context. That citation half is also **parked** — it needs LLM-API spend, which is off; no harness was run for this launch, and the site-wide context will only be attached at review if/when API spend is re-enabled.

What we *can* measure per page, for free, is crawler re-fetch frequency — a proxy for "the bots noticed a change worth re-reading." We treat that as the readable signal and are explicit that it is a proxy.

## What would count as a result

A sustained rise in crawler re-fetches of the treatment page that the control does not share, ideally alongside (not proven by) a site-wide citation uptick. We will not claim the rewrite "raised citations" on site-wide data alone.