Research notes
Notes on how discovery systems actually work.
Short write-ups from our research into search and AI discovery. No forecasts, no invented terminology — documented mechanisms, primary sources, and what they mean for decisions.
How AI assistants choose the sources they cite
Citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are not generated from memory. They come from a retrieval layer that behaves like a search engine — because it mostly is one.
What decides whether you appear in Google's AI Overviews
Google has documented the eligibility mechanism, and it is mostly classic search. What that means in practice — and the opt-out mistake careful teams keep making.
The crawler decisions that quietly control your AI visibility
robots.txt has become a commercial policy document. A field guide to the agents in it — and the CDN default that blocks them without asking you.