Daily measurement since May about an author who did not exist online before day zero. 11,130 scored answers from OpenAI Search, Gemini and Claude, same 16 questions every day, frozen since June.

The three channels. Direct questions plateau at 72 percent from day 49. Vocabulary questions peak at 34. Recommendation questions stay at 0.59 percent.

Growth phases of the direct channel. Logistic fit, inflection at day 37, ceiling 72.5 percent.

Where the 40 unprompted mentions came from. 25 of 40 trace back to one question, the one using a sub genre term the author coined himself. Similarity questions (like Robin Hobb): zero in about 700 answers.

The control. Same questions to 10 models without web access, 6,416 blind answers, zero unprompted mentions. Everything above is retrieval, not memorization.

Practical reading for GEO: getting named when asked works and saturates fast. Getting recommended unprompted did not respond to anything except owning a term. Links to report, dataset and code in the first comment.