arXiv AI

CHASE: How Content Ecosystems Are Reshaped When Ranking Is the Only Target

arXiv AI
Sep 4

When Optimization Becomes Manipulation: Defending Generative Search against Malicious Generative Engine Optimization

The paper introduces GEO Defender, a two‑stage defense system designed to protect generative search engines from malicious Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) attacks that rewrite web documents to manipulate generated answers. GEO Defender comprises a Shield Reranker, which learns a defensive residual to demote GEO‑rewritten documents while maintaining relevance, and a Training‑Free Shield Generation component that creates a natural‑language library guiding the target LLM’s source usage during inference. Experiments on both closed‑source and open‑source large language models show that GEO Defender dramatically lowers attack success rates from 50.32% to 6.20%, preserves over 94% of benign evidence usage, and maintains answer quality while generalizing to unseen attacks.

By Haozhang Li, Yangguang Shao, Xinjie Lin, Zhong Guan, Mi Zhou, Junzheng Shi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search

CITECHOICE is a causal audit that examines how the presentation of documents in an agentic search engine redistributes citation credit. Using 129 everyday‑query transcripts, the study compares structured versus prose renderings of the same source while keeping all other transcript elements fixed. The results show that structured rendering increases the target’s citation count by about half a citation per answer without adding total citations or diminishing competitors’ credit, while also revealing that rank position has a larger effect on citation rates than presentation order alone.

By Sriram Selvam, Anneswa Ghosh
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Agent2UCB: Agentic System for Generative Engine Optimization

Agent2UCB is a new agentic system designed for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which refines content to boost its likelihood of being cited or summarized by generative AI search engines. The system autonomously evaluates nine GEO strategies for each content item, selects the most effective one, and speeds up this selection using a bandit-based Agent2UCB policy that blends large language model priors with real-time reward signals. Additionally, it offers a lightweight, text-only SEO readiness check that assesses readability, topical coverage, and EEAT-style credibility, and experiments on GEO-Bench demonstrate consistent visibility gains while maintaining SEO quality.

By Sheldon Yu, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Doga Dogan, Junda Wu, Julian McAuley
arXiv AI
Aug 13

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.

By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi