... year ago, half the marketing world told us "AI search" was overhyped. The other half was shipping "ChatGPT SEOchecklists" in a week. We ignored both. Instead we did one boring thing: we scraped LLM citations. Every day. Across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. For hundreds of brands. And we asked one question when AI recommends a product, where does that recommendation actually come from? Here's what we found that nobody was talking about: LLMs don't "rank" pages. They ... ... stitch together snippets from sources that often aren't even on page 1 of Google. The #1 lever for AI visibility isn't your website. It's third-party mentions (listicles, Reddit threads, niche blogs, comparison pages). Most "AI