How does AI choose sources for its answers?
An AI assistant takes names either from a search it runs while answering your question, and then there are links under the answer, or from memory, and then there are no links. From what it finds, it needs fitting pieces of text, not whole sites. And it more often names those that other sites write about. If it named someone else and not you, first check whether there was a search and whether the bot can see your text.
Roman Kaufman, founder of Kaufman Lab · Data as of: October 2026
Say you built a site for your online English lessons and asked ChatGPT where to study online. It named three schools with no links. When you asked again, it named different ones. So you spend your evenings rewriting your home page. Why did the AI pick them, and why different ones each time? The answer is in where the AI gets its answer from.
Links under the answer show whether the AI searched
An AI has two roads to an answer. From memory, it retells what it read during training and gives no links. If it searches the internet right while you ask, there are links under the answer.
ChatGPT searches less often than it seems. In February 2026, the service Profound analyzed about 730,000 conversations of Americans with ChatGPT from late 2025. ChatGPT went to the internet in about 18% of them. In the rest, it answered from memory.
Alice, Yandex's AI assistant, relies on pages that usually rank high in Yandex search, according to Yandex's help pages. ChatGPT searches for several versions of the question at once. Ahrefs measured this in summer 2025: only about 8% of ChatGPT's links are in Google's top ten.
Without a search, an AI will not name a new site, because the site is not in its memory. We check whether AI assistants name our site. On August 31, 2026, we removed GigaChat (Sber's AI assistant) from our check, because it has no search. Your answer about lessons most likely came from memory too, and your evening edits will not change it.
AI compares pieces of text, not whole pages
In October 2025, Krishna Madhavan from the Bing team explained in a Microsoft blog post that an AI with search does not read a page from top to bottom like a person. It cuts the text into small pieces and builds the answer from the best ones, sometimes from different sites. A paragraph that makes sense without the rest of the page has a chance to get into the answer.
The AI may not see part of the text at all. Microsoft writes that it can skip blocks in tabs and drop-down lists. It also reads text in images and PDFs without headings less well. If the price of your lessons is written on a banner, the AI may not have your piece for the question "сколько стоит урок английского онлайн" ("how much does an online English lesson cost"). Then it will take someone else's.
AI more often names those that other sites write about
Maybe other sites simply write a lot about the three schools from ChatGPT's answer, and nobody mentions you anywhere.
In December 2025, the service Ahrefs checked 75,000 brands. The thing most strongly connected with whether ChatGPT names a brand is the number of its mentions on other sites: 0.66 on a scale where 1 means a full connection. Links to the site and the number of its pages are barely connected. The authors point out that this is a connection, not a cause.
In September 2026, none of the three AI assistants with search named our site, even though search engines found no errors on it. We think the weak spots are the site's young age and that almost nobody had written about us.
On top of that, the list of names changes almost every time. SparkToro measured this with almost 3,000 runs in November and December 2025. The chance that ChatGPT names the same set of brands twice is less than 1 in 100. So you cannot judge by one answer. Alice was not tested in this study.
Check your site through the eyes of an AI
An AI with search takes one paragraph from a page. So you need to fix one piece: the one that answers your student.
- Ask ChatGPT (chatgpt.com) and Alice (alice.yandex.ru) a client's question without naming your site, and see if there are links under the answer. No links? Then the AI answered from memory. Ask the question again with search turned on in ChatGPT. This takes 5 minutes.
- Open your page and press Ctrl+U (on a Mac, Cmd+Option+U). The page code opens. This is how the bot sees the page. Use Ctrl+F to find your answer sentence. If you don't find it, the bot does not see it. 10 minutes is enough.
- If the sentence is not in the code, or it is hidden in a tab, move it into a normal paragraph in your site editor today.
Alice named others? Type the same question on ya.ru (Yandex search) and see if your page is in the top ten results. If it is not there, start with a check of whether search sees your pages. ChatGPT named others? Open the sites from its links and see if they write about you.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI read a site made with a website builder?
AI can read a site made with a website builder if the text is in the page code right away. According to data from the hosting company Vercel as of late 2024, the bots of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not run scripts, the programs that add text to a page after it loads. They may not see such text. Website builders were not tested there, so look at your page code with Ctrl+U.
Do Alice and ChatGPT need different work?
The work for Alice and for ChatGPT differs only in part. For Alice, the first thing to check is where the page ranks in Yandex. Both need a paragraph with a direct answer. The connection with mentions on other sites was measured only for ChatGPT and Google.
What signs make an AI trust a site?
An AI picks pages that answer the question directly, and the other signs differ between systems. Yandex writes that Alice AI picks the most relevant, informative and high-quality pages. It advises showing authors, a portfolio and client reviews on the site. For ChatGPT, according to the Ahrefs study, mentions on other sites are most strongly connected with its choice.