Want ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business? Your Own Website Is the Key

A researcher named Benjamin Tannenbaum analyzed 34,960 AI answers collected from 75 anonymous marketing projects between June and September 2026. The test was simple: ask ChatGPT and Gemini ordinary questions that don't name any company — things like "best running shoes" or "top accounting software" — and then check whether the target brand got mentioned in the reply.

The gap was enormous. When a brand's own website never showed up in the sources the AI pulled from, the brand was mentioned only about 2.8% of the time on GPT and 3.8% on Gemini. When the AI did cite the company's own website, mentions jumped to 49% and 58%. When the AI both cited the site and also ran related searches that included brand names (what the paper calls a "branded fan-out," essentially the AI widening its search after reading about you), mentions hit 91.4% on GPT and 100% on Gemini. The pattern held even when comparing the same question, run repeatedly, on the same tool.

Tannenbaum then built a prediction model using past behavior plus what the AI was reading in real time. On a fresh set of answers it set aside for testing, the model guessed correctly about 96% of the time on GPT and 94% on Gemini. Past mentions matter too: if a brand was mentioned before and still has its site cited now, the next answer mentions it about 80-84% of the time.

The catch is important. This is an observational study, not proof of cause and effect — the author says plainly it doesn't describe what's happening inside these companies' private systems. It's also a preprint, meaning it hasn't been reviewed by other experts yet, and the data comes from marketing agency projects, not a random sample of all businesses. One surprise: how well a webpage matched the question mattered far less on GPT than simply being present as a source.