How AI assistants decide which businesses to name

Every answer draws on one or both of two sources:

• What the model already knows. Large language models are trained on a huge snapshot of text, then frozen. Anything they learned about your business came from pages that existed before that snapshot. They cannot know about a change you made last month.
• What it looks up. Most assistants can now search the web while answering, read a few pages and write an answer from them. This is often called grounding. A searched answer usually lists its sources as citations.

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can answer either way, depending on the question and the settings. Perplexity always searches. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews are built on Google Search.

Because the two sources hold different information. A model's trained knowledge may remember a restaurant that closed or miss one that opened recently. A searched answer depends on which pages the search happened to return that time.

There is also chance involved. Assistants do not pick the single most likely answer every time, so asking the same question twice can produce a different list. We explain this in why AI assistants give different answers each time.

This is why we ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini each question twice when we measure: once from their own knowledge and once with web search. Merging the two into one number would hide exactly the difference a business needs to see.

None of the companies publishes a formula, so be wary of anyone who claims to know one. What is well established is what an assistant needs before it can name you at all:

• It must be able to read your website. If its crawler is blocked, it cannot cite you. Chapter 2.
• It must be able to tell what you do and where. A page that never plainly says "we are a dental practice on Main Street, Gibraltar" leaves it guessing. Chapter 3.
• It must find other sites that agree. Directories, review sites, local press and your Google Business Profile corroborate what your own site claims. Chapter 4.
• It must find a page that answers the question asked. A customer asking for "a lawyer for buying a flat in Gibraltar" is better served by a page about property purchases than by a generic homepage. Chapter 5.

1. 1Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the question a new customer would ask, such as "best accountant in Gibraltar for a small company". Note who they name and which sites they cite.
2. 2Ask again in a new chat. If the answers differ, you have seen why a single search is not a measurement.
3. 3Run the free visibility check to put a few of your sector's published questions to a live assistant.