Technical GEO: Ellipsis finds highly cited pages load 24% faster
Technical GEO research from Ellipsis analyzed 5,069 pages and found that pages in the high-citation cohort loaded 24% faster than comparison pages.
What did the Technical GEO research find?
Technical GEO research from Ellipsis found that pages in the high-citation cohort loaded 24% faster than comparison pages. Ellipsis conducted the study with Pantheon. It analyzed 5,069 pages across 33 technical properties.
The team measured each page through a plain HTTP fetch. The analysis covered fetch time, rendering, structured data, headings, boilerplate and content wrapping.
How was the Technical GEO study conducted?
Ellipsis compared a high-citation cohort with pages appearing alongside them in the same Google AI Overview responses. The high-citation pages were 3.4 times more likely to earn an AI Overview citation.
Page-level comparisons mattered. Faster and slower pages could sit on the same site, sharing the same infrastructure and template. This made fetch time the strongest individual technical signal in the dataset.
Does page speed cause more AI citations?
The study found a correlation between page speed and AI citations. It does not prove that making a page 24% faster will produce a corresponding increase in citations.
Faster pages may be easier for AI systems to retrieve. Speed can also reflect better templates and stronger editorial systems. The within-site result provides useful evidence, but controlled testing is still needed.
Which other technical factors mattered?
High-citation pages carried four times less boilerplate than the comparison cohort. Pages that required JavaScript to reveal their primary content were about half as likely to be cited.
Every page with more than 100 AI citations had structured data, published-date metadata and semantic HTML. These signals set a technical floor. Speed and a clean initial response separated the strongest pages once that floor was in place.
What should technical teams change?
Technical teams should measure fetch time at URL level, deliver the main content in the initial HTML and reduce template boilerplate. A fast site average can hide individual pages that remain difficult to retrieve.
The findings appear in Pantheon’s whitepaper, Making Your Website AI-Ready: How to Build for Humans, Agents, and Everything in Between. Pantheon partnered with Ellipsis to test which technical properties correlate with stronger AI citation performance.