How ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity choose which businesses to cite
Two ways of answering: memory and web search
An AI assistant answers in one of two ways. Without web search, it draws on what it learned during training: a snapshot of the web frozen at a given date, often patchy for small businesses. With web search, it queries a search engine, reads a few pages, then writes its answer and cites its sources.
For a question like “which provider should I choose near me”, assistants increasingly rely on web search. That’s good news for a small business: what you publish today can be read tomorrow, without waiting for a new model to be trained.
What each assistant uses, according to its own documentation
- ChatGPT: OpenAI’s help centre explains that ChatGPT can search the web automatically when a question calls for it, rewrites the question into one or more queries sent to partner search providers, and shows citations. To be indexed, OpenAI asks you to allow its OAI-SearchBot crawler.
- Gemini and Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode): Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in its AI features. The page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Google Search. Google also describes “query fan-out”: several searches run in parallel on sub-topics to build the answer.
- Claude: Anthropic states that Claude provides direct citations when it uses information from the web, and that web search has been available on all its plans since May 2025. Anthropic runs several crawlers, including Claude-SearchBot for search quality and Claude-User for fetches triggered by a user.
- Perplexity: its documentation describes PerplexityBot as the crawler that surfaces and links websites in its results, and states that it is not used to train models.
What tips the balance
No provider publishes the exact recipe behind its choices. But when you look at the answers and the sources they cite, the same ingredients keep coming up:
- Relevance: a page that answers the question precisely (trade, location, use case) rather than a generic home page.
- Corroboration: several independent sources saying the same thing about you (directories, reviews, press, comparison articles).
- Reputation: plenty of recent, detailed reviews. For local search, Google lists prominence, including your number of reviews and links to your business, among its three ranking factors.
- Clarity: information that is easy to extract (who you are, where, for whom, at what price, with what proof).
- Freshness: up-to-date information that is consistent from one source to the next.
Our method explains how these criteria translate into concrete measurements.