One Hypertext Study Reports 2.6 Times the Citations for Structured HTML

A paper in the Proceedings of the 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext, published 5 September 2026, measures how authored structure changes attribution inside generative retrieval. The authors call the practice answer engine optimization and define generative share of voice as a probability, not a rank.

The abstract's main controlled result is about markup. Structured HTML, they write, yielded 2.6 times higher citation rates and 4.0 times higher extraction fidelity than equivalent unstructured content, with lower attention entropy. They describe the test as controlled retrieval injection on open-weight models. A replication note in the body says a Mistral-7B-Instruct run showed a citation rate of 84.3 percent against 29.1 percent, and extraction fidelity of 79.8 percent against 18.6 percent.

The placement result is not the markup result

The same abstract separates a second claim. Controlled source substitution found that community corpus placement increased citation probability for subjective queries by 18.2 percentage points, with p less than 0.001, and the authors say that shift was independent of content quality. A 12-month field study and a check across 12 entities are summarized with Cohen's d of 1.42. Those figures are the paper's, from a conference abstract and the opening of the article, not a measurement of OctoLink's own pages.

Source: ACM Hypertext, Beyond the Blue Link.