Hello Reader!

Last week, we talked about the downfall of generic TOFU content.

A couple of days later, Suganthan Mohanadasan published research that makes the case clearer, particularly how it relates to AI search results.

He read ChatGPT's network traffic across 60 conversations and found that ChatGPT writes brand names into its own search queries before it fetches a single page. Ask it for the best AI note-taking app, and it searches for Granola, Notion AI, Otter, and Fireflies by name. Nobody typed those brands. They came out of the model. In 21 of the 27 conversations he tested, the very first query contained brands the user never mentioned.

Being on ChatGPT's shortlist matters. Brands named in ChatGPT's own query showed up in the final answer 68.9% of the time. Brands that got fetched during the search but were never named? 2.1%. That's a 33x gap.

He's careful to say the query isn't the whole game (he updated the article to make that point), but it's the entry ticket. You can rank #1 for "what is ecommerce" and still lose in ChatGPT, because the shortlist exists in the model's memory before your website gets touched. He also found 86 cases where a brand got recommended, and its site was never fetched at all.

So what gets a brand into that query? Per his article, it's being written about, reviewed, and compared across the open web for years, until the association lands in the training data. Earned coverage, third-party mentions, other people talking about your brand. Schema and page speed don't touch it, because your server isn't contacted before the shortlist forms.

My favorite example from his data is the electric SUV query. ChatGPT didn't name a single manufacturer. It searched for Car and Driver, Edmunds, and Top Gear. In that category, the only way into the answer is through the publications your buyers already read.

And here's where it connects to what I said last week about TOFU content. No one cares about a generic explainer enough to cite it, review it, share it, or talk about it. Nobody cites a definition that appears on 40 other sites. The content that earns mentions is original data, takes people argue with, and SME insight nobody else has.

The most strategic change we can make right now is what kind of content we invest in. Less keyword-first explainer volume. More original research, strong opinions, and deep product content.

(Caveat: his numbers come from one account, so treat them as directional. The mechanism is reproducible in about two minutes, and he shows you how.)

Thanks for reading,

Ashley