Why should I analyze the citation links of AI searches?

Every company is currently confronted with the question of how to improve their ranking in AI searches like ChatGPT, and others. 

LLMs are trained with an amount of data. But they are only trained once and rarely re-trained. It’s too expensive. LLMs do not learn over time. After the training, their learning stays the same. Except for the new technology of adding web results to the prompt that you put in or embeddings (which we will not cover here).

This means you have to separate your activities for Generative Engines Optimization into two approaches. The long-term approach to get your brand into the training data and the short-term approach to get into the citation urls. 

Why are the citation urls so important?

OpenAI (parent company of ChatGPT) implemented a technology called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), which allows them to add fresh, new content via web results into the prompt context, when you or your customers are asking ChatGPT (and other AI searches) a question to update their knowledge instantly. 

Whenever you see ChatGPT showing you the “Searching …”, it’s activating its web search capabilities. 

Why is that so important?

Because this is only short-term way to get into answers of AI searches if your brand is not visible in the training data (or not well positioned enough)

That’s why OtterlyAI focuses so much on monitoring citation URLs of AI search results and helps you to identify the relevant citation urls for your brand.