Where do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity get their answers?

This summer, a good many people deciding where to go on holiday asked ChatGPT before they asked a friend. What came back was neither invention nor opinion, since AI has neither, at least for now. What an LLM “thinks” is built, more than on anything else, on what journalists, guidebooks and publications have written about a place over the years, and above all recently. Where nobody has written anything, the destination does not come up. A competitor's name does.

From search results to answers: citations replace clicks

For twenty years, being visible online meant climbing into Google's top ten links. Almost nobody scrolls those ten links now. They read a single answer, assembled from the three or four sources the engine has chosen to cite. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity summarise, and in summarising they decide who gets named.

Their answers diverge more than you would expect, too. The same question put to all three comes back as three different lists, and even the same engine asked twice can shift. What does not shift is the pool they draw from: a handful of names recur across all three, most appear on one alone, and a great many appear nowhere. Being named is neither automatic nor neutral.

So who writes the answers?

Editorial work does. Advertising does not. A 2026 Muck Rack analysis found that 84% of what generative AI cites comes from articles, reviews, guides and news publications, while paid advertising accounts for under 1% of citations. Ad space can be bought. A citation inside a generated answer arrives only when somebody has chosen to write about you. Getting there is a craft, and the craft is called Media PR. Getting there on purpose is a strategy.

Why one brand appears and another does not

The quickest way to understand it is to try. Ask ChatGPT whether Bormio is worth a few days: what comes back echoes what the press has written about it, not the destination's own website or its latest sponsored post. Strip away that editorial coverage and Bormio would not be in the answer at all.

The same mechanism governs the three worlds we work in every day.

• Destinations. A German cycle tourist types “Where should I ride in Italy for a week?” and gets three or four names back. Two alpine valleys with identical potential can sit at opposite ends of that list, depending on how much has been written about them, and where.
• Events. Ask “Which are the big cycling events in Italy next season?” and some fixtures come up every time, while others, no less important and often run better, never surface. The difference rarely lies in the quality of the event. It lies in the coverage.
• Brands and products. A rider training for a gran fondo asks which helmet is best over long distances. The names that come back are the ones somebody has tested, reviewed and written up. About a product nobody has covered, an AI simply has nothing to say, so it recommends a competitor's instead.

AI citations are perishable: what counts is staying present

There is a second layer, less obvious than the first. Being cited once achieves little, because citations age fast and are replaced continuously.

• Ahrefs, working from a sample of 17 million citations in 2026, found that half of what AI cites comes from content published in the previous eleven months, and that content updated within the last month attracts roughly three times as many citations.
• Writesonic, also in 2026, put the median lifespan of an AI citation at eleven to fifteen days, with around 44% disappearing almost at once.

The practical consequence for anyone who communicates: what keeps a name inside the answers is continuity of coverage, far more than the single big hit. An article published today becomes one of the sources an AI draws on tomorrow, and whoever stops being written about sees their visibility slide within a few weeks.

GEO is a new name for an old craft

All of this now travels under an acronym, GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization and a direct descendant of SEO, Search Engine Optimization. The acronym earns its keep, because the problem is genuinely new. The work it calls for is not. It is what public relations have always done: getting the right people to talk about you, in the right places, consistently. As we said, AI holds no opinions. It does not invent authority. It cites it. And it cites whoever has earned it.

Vitesse is an Italian Media PR and communications agency specialised in cycling, sport, outdoor and active tourism. It is what we have been doing since 1991 for brands such as Ursus and Northwave, for platforms such as Wikiloc, for events such as the Tour of the Alps and the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Val di Sole, and for the alpine and other destinations we work with: building the editorial presence that now decides what an AI answers.

You can run the test yourself in thirty seconds. Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and ask about your brand, your event, your destination. What you read back is a mirror of what has been written about you so far. If you do not like the reflection, start writing, and start getting others to write.

Or, if you would rather do it together, get in touch. Coffee's on us.