Ahrefs maps the four places ChatGPT reads to write an answer

Ranking on Google is not the thing that gets a brand into a ChatGPT answer. Ahrefs says only 8 percent of pages ChatGPT cites also rank in Google's top 10 for the same question. A post by Si Quan Ong maps the four places ChatGPT actually reads before it writes an answer.

The four sources are not interchangeable. A team that wants to be found in a ChatGPT answer has to work on all four. The work is different for each one.

The four sources Ahrefs names

The first source is training data. OpenAI's own page lists four parts to it: publicly available web content, partnerships with third parties, users, human trainers and researchers, and synthetic data. Ahrefs says training data takes months or years to update.

The second is live web search. ChatGPT writes short search queries of its own on the fly and sends them to a search provider. Ahrefs says ChatGPT also runs its own crawler. Ahrefs measured 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT responses between August and September 2026. Responses that used live search had an average of 1.6 search queries each.

The third is licensed publisher content. OpenAI has paid deals with named publishers to pull from. Ahrefs tracks the share of citations that go to those partners inside its 200 most-cited domains. It was 7.5 percent in March 2026 and 15.8 percent in July. The share then came back down: 14.2 percent in August, 12.5 percent in September.

The fourth is user context. That is the prompt, uploaded files, chat history, memory and any connected apps. Ahrefs says this is the one the team cannot influence from outside.

Where ranking does and does not help

Ahrefs cites a 2025 study of 15,000 prompts. About 8 percent of pages ChatGPT cited also appeared in Google's top 10 for the same question. The figure was about the same for Bing's top 10. A second study looked at the queries ChatGPT itself wrote during fan-out. It found only 6.82 percent of ChatGPT's results in Google's top 10.

The brand pages are the exception. Ahrefs measured 4,000 US brand prompts from its Brand Radar in October 2026. On a brand question, 83 percent of the answers cited the brand's own website. It was the first citation in 70 percent of them.

What the numbers mean for a team

A team that ranks for its own brand on Google is doing most of what ChatGPT needs on brand questions. For every other question, Google ranking is a weak proxy. The team's work on live search is editing pages so a short query gets a short, named answer. The work on partnerships is harder, because the list of partners is OpenAI's to choose.

A team spending on AI search should run one brand question and one non-brand question on ChatGPT in the morning. Look at who is cited and compare it to the Google top 10 for the same question. If the two lists barely overlap, the team is measuring the wrong thing on Google.

Source

• Where Does ChatGPT Get Its Information? 4 Sources, Explained, Ahrefs, Si Quan Ong