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Series · 8 articles

How AI Search Works

A look under the hood of AI answers: the crawlers that feed the engines, how they pick which brands to cite, and why the same content shows up in one engine and vanishes in another.

  1. 01The AI crawler lifecycle: train, index, and answerGPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User. The same lab runs different bots for different jobs. Understand the train / index / answer lifecycle and you'll know exactly which crawlers to let in.3 min read
  2. 02Why AI cites one brand and ignores a near-identical competitorTwo similar posts, two very different outcomes. One gets quoted by ChatGPT, the other never appears. The reasons split into a content layer and a platform layer. Here's how to tell which is hurting you.3 min read
  3. 03Why AI loves listicles (and what brands should do about it)For 'best X for Y' questions, AI engines cite third-party roundups far more than brand-owned pages. Here's the mechanism behind it, and the strategy that follows.3 min read
  4. 04Content freshness and the 3-month citation cliffAI engines favour recently-updated pages, and citations decay sharply for content that goes stale. Why 'publish and forget' loses in AI search, and how to refresh deliberately.2 min read
  5. 05Entity strength: why AI already 'knows' some brandsAI engines lean on how well-established your brand is as an entity. Often more than on backlinks or technical SEO. It's the slowest GEO lever, and the most durable. Here's how to build it.2 min read
  6. 06Query fan-out: why one question becomes a dozen searchesWhen you ask an AI a question, it doesn't run one search. It fans it out into many sub-queries, pulls from different sources for each, and stitches the results together. Here's how that works and what it means for getting cited.3 min read
  7. 07Beyond RAG: AI search is going agenticAI search is moving from 'retrieve and summarise' to 'plan, browse, compare, and act.' What agentic AI search means, and why your content now has to support tasks, not just answer questions.2 min read
  8. 08The ChatGPT citation lag: why content gets crawled for weeks before it gets citedAI bots often crawl a new page heavily for weeks before it starts showing up in answers. Here's the crawl-to-cite pipeline, why heavy crawling with zero citations is a good sign, and what it means for what you publish.3 min read