ChatGPT picks its favorites before it searches

Ask ChatGPT for the best roofer in your city and you probably picture it going out, reading the web, and coming back with whatever it found. That is not the order it happens in. ChatGPT writes its own search query first, and that query usually already has brand names sitting in it.

Suganthan Mohanadasan, co-founder at Snippet Digital, logged the search queries ChatGPT fires off behind the scenes and published what he saw. Search Engine Journal covered it on August 14.

Across 27 conversations, 21 had brand names in that first query which the user never typed. And the gap between the two kinds of brand is enormous. Brands ChatGPT named in its own query made the final answer 68.9% of the time. Brands it only ran into while reading search results made it 2.1% of the time. That is roughly 33 to 1.

## What this looks like when someone asks about your business

Picture a guy who gets asked who to call for a busted water heater in Marietta. Before he opens his laptop he writes three names on a napkin from memory. Then he searches, mostly to check the napkin. A page he reads that isn't on the napkin can still earn a spot, but it has to be very good, and most aren't.

Your site is one of the pages he reads. If your name never made the napkin, ranking well in what he pulls up buys you that 2.1%.

## Getting cited is harder than it looks

The rest of the data is rough for anyone counting on this channel. ChatGPT pulled 3,554 pages across the study and cited 110 of them, a rate of 3.1%. It reads something like 600 pages to write a single answer and quotes almost none of it.

Position still counts. ChatGPT cited the first result in a group 5.2% of the time, and the sixth or later 0.3% of the time.

One number here you can act on this month. When a domain had six or more pages sitting in the results, its citation rate fell to 1.7%. Domains with one page hit 4.0%. Your own pages compete with each other. Three service pages that each half-answer "water heater repair" split you three ways. Mohanadasan puts the sweet spot at two tightly matched pages and says past six you're mostly running against yourself.

## Two different jobs, and only one of them is website work

Getting on the napkin is reputation. Reviews, mentions on other people's sites, local press, directories, customers typing your business name somewhere that gets read and scraped. A homepage redesign does nothing for it.

Winning the citation once you're on the napkin is the site work. One clear page per service instead of four overlapping ones. The answer sentence near the top of the page in plain text, where a crawler can lift it, instead of buried under a hero animation or sitting inside an image. Both jobs run in months rather than weeks, and the reputation one runs longest.

## Is AI traffic even worth chasing yet

Shopify's numbers say yes, up to a point. Search Engine Land reported on August 13 that Shopify's AI-referred sessions grew 197% year over year in Q2, with orders roughly tripling. Organic search grew 12% in the same window, on a much larger base, and is still the biggest source of traffic they see. Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin summed it up by saying the pie itself got bigger.

AI search is a second door into your business. Google is still the front one and it is still wider.

One caveat on all of this. The research came from a single account, over two days in July, across a few dozen conversations. Mohanadasan calls it directional rather than a measurement, and he's right to. Personalization moves what any one person sees. Don't rebuild your marketing plan around it.

I also still don't know where the napkin comes from. Some of it has to be training data, whatever the model soaked up about your category before it ever met you. Some of it could be memory from your own past chats. Those two would call for very different responses from a business owner, and I haven't seen anyone pull them apart yet.

## Do this one thing this week

Open ChatGPT and ask it your category question the way a customer would. "Best HVAC company in Alpharetta." Ask it five times, in fresh chats, and write down which businesses come back.

If your name never comes back, you have a napkin problem, and editing pages will not solve it. You now know what the next six months of work is. If your name does come back and a competitor still wins the recommendation, you're in the page game instead, which moves faster.

The growth work we run for clients is mostly the first kind. Mentions stacking up, reviews stacking up, and one page that answers one question all the way. It's the part you can't do in a day.


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SOURCES
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-already-knows-who-itll-recommend-before-it-searches/585162/&source=gmail&ust=1786923042290000&sa=E
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://suganthan.com/blog/chatgpt-decides-before-it-searches/&source=gmail&ust=1786923042290000&sa=E
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://searchengineland.com/shopify-ai-referrals-up-organic-search-leads-traffic-484962&source=gmail&ust=1786923042290000&sa=E