Anyone who wants to know how to end up in ChatGPT's answers first needs to know where those answers come from. That's less mysterious than it seems. There are two routes, and they work in fundamentally different ways.

01 / route oneKnowledge from training

The language model behind ChatGPT was trained on a large amount of text from the open web, up to a cut-off date. Everything the model read about your field, your market and possibly your business during that period is processed into the model itself.

If you ask ChatGPT about your market without the search function, it answers entirely from this memory. As a result, the answer can lag years behind reality, and the model rarely mentions how old its knowledge is.

This route is slow and incomplete. If you're not featured in it, you can't fix that quickly: new content only reaches the model at the next training round, and no one outside OpenAI decides what goes into it. What it does give you: texts that have been online for years, and are widely read and widely cited, carry the most weight here. It's the long term of AI visibility.

02 / route twoLive web search

If the search function is switched on, ChatGPT searches the web live at the moment of the question, reads a number of pages and builds an answer from them with source citations. This is the route where you can make a difference in the short term, because what counts here is what's on the web right now, and whether your pages are readable and findable at that moment.

The selection works in two steps. First, a search query determines which pages are retrieved. Then the model decides which passages from those pages make it into the answer. That second step is where structure makes the difference: a page that answers the question literally, in a passage that's readable on its own, is more likely to be cited than a page where the answer is spread across twelve paragraphs.

Note a detail that's often missed: the question the user asks is rarely the search query the system actually runs. ChatGPT rephrases the question, sometimes splits it into several search queries and combines the results. So you don't need to cover every conceivable phrasing; you need to treat the topic fully and clearly, so your page rises to the top for several of those derived search queries.

The two routes side by side:

In practice, this means that any improvement you make today can already show up in the next answer via route two, while the same improvement only filters through the model itself much later. So anyone working on their visibility almost always works on route two first; route one follows naturally as texts stay online longer and get cited more often.

03 / broader than googleWhy a top position isn't required

ChatGPT looks more broadly than just the top results of a search engine. Where Google's AI Overviews lean heavily on their own rankings, ChatGPT draws its sources from a wider selection and relies less on position than a search engine does.

For an AI answer, you're not competing with ten blue links, but with every page that answers the question better than yours.

That cuts both ways. The favourable side: a well-structured page from a small business can be cited without that page ranking at the top of Google. The unfavourable side: a top position in Google is no guarantee of a place in the answer. The selection criteria overlap, but they're not the same. How those criteria differ per platform is explained further in how Perplexity works and how to get into the sources.

04 / third partiesWikipedia, Reddit and trade media count too

ChatGPT cites sources that aren't from the businesses themselves surprisingly often. According to analyses of ChatGPT's citation patterns, Wikipedia accounts for roughly 7.8 per cent of citations and Reddit for roughly 1.8 per cent, with review sites and trade media adding to that. An answer about your market can therefore be made up of what others write about that market, while no business site is cited at all.

For your visibility, this means your own site is only half the story. What appears about your market and your business on third-party platforms helps determine whether and how you show up in answers. What AI visibility covers in full is explained in what is AI visibility; what we do about it in practice can be found at datadriftdigital.nl.

Who doesn't need any of this: businesses without customers who search online. For everyone with inflow from search traffic, these two routes together determine where that inflow comes from in the years ahead.

This text was produced with AI assistance and reviewed and approved by a human before publication.