A while back I posted here about counting the sources behind a handful of AI answers. I kept going, and I now have 241 software categories measured.
For each category I asked ChatGPT and Gemini the six questions a buyer actually types (best X, best free X, most affordable X, best for small teams, what should I use, recommendations), gave each one a live web search, and logged every product named and every source behind the answer. That is 1,446 answers and 5,037 product mentions.
Three things stood out:
1. Reddit was a source behind the answers in 93% of categories. Capterra, the review directory a lot of us pay for, in 12%. The assistants lean on forums and independent roundups, not the review grid.
I keep a daily probe that asks the assistants the buying questions in my category and records every source behind every answer. Last week I pointed it at Google's two AI surfaces, the AI Overview box and the fuller AI Mode, and counted.
Thirteen answers. 168 citations. Every single answer used a different domain for each of its sources. Not one domain was cited twice, in any answer, the whole week. Thirteen of thirteen, no repeats.
That stopped me, because it is the opposite of how a normal search results page behaves. On the ten blue links, one strong site often takes three or four of the top spots. A page that ranks well ranks well repeatedly. Here, ranking well once seemed to use up the domain for that answer.
Why an AI answer looks like this An assistant does not hand you a ranked list. It breaks your question into several smaller ones, runs those, and assembles an answer from the best source it found for each. Google's own patent on query variants (US11663201B2) describes dynamic control that "can often lead to a relatively large (e.g., more than 5, more than 10, or more than 15) quantity of variants."
Here is what a week of AI traffic looks like on our site, measured rather than guessed.
In 24 hours, AI crawlers requested our pages 479 times. Applebot 179, meta-externalagent 180, ChatGPT-User 74, ClaudeBot 26, GPTBot 20.
Over seven days, assistants sent us real people: three visits from chatgpt.com , one from perplexity.ai
, two from Bing, arriving from Turkey, Greece, Hong Kong, Korea, the US and China. Small numbers. Real ones, from a browser beacon where bots cannot appear.
