Position-adjusted word count is the visibility metric used in the Princeton GEO research (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). It measures how much of an AI answer a given source contributes, weighting that contribution by where it appears, so words cited earlier and more prominently count for more than words buried near the end.
For brands, the term matters mainly as context for the research it comes from. The GEO study used this metric to test content edits and found that adding statistics, quotations, and citations could lift a source's visibility by a large margin, while keyword stuffing reduced it. The metric itself is academic, but the finding behind it is practical: evidence-rich, well-structured content gets surfaced more.