Video

How AI Search Engines Work (Ahrefs AEO Course 1.1)

Ahrefs (Sam Oh) · youtube.com

How AI Search Engines Work (Ahrefs AEO Course 1.1)

The clearest ten-minute explanation of retrieval, ranking, and citation for non-engineers.

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The question it answers

  1. How do AI assistants actually choose which sources to cite in an answer?

Read with it

  1. The peer-reviewed experiment that coined GEO and proved which content tweaks raise citation visibility 22-41%. arxiv.org Article GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (the original paper) Aggarwal, Murahari et al. (Princeton & IIT Delhi)
  2. Large-scale evidence that mentions and citations are different things, and how each is earned. semrush.com Article How AI Search Really Works: Findings from Our AI Visibility Study Semrush
  3. Shows even one assistant cites differently by mode, so you must test prompts, not assume. semrush.com Article Only 25% of cited sources overlap between ChatGPT's reasoning modes Semrush
  4. 3.7M citations analyzed: 91% of cited URLs appear in only one engine, which changes your whole strategy. growth-memo.com Article The Consensus Gap Kevin Indig (Growth Memo)
  5. Video How Ranking in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity Differ (Ahrefs AEO Course 1.2) Ahrefs (Sam Oh)
  6. A developer's technical teardown of Perplexity's multi-stage pipeline, from candidate pages to inline citations. ziptie.dev Article How Perplexity AI Answers Work: Retrieval, Ranking, and Citation Pipeline ZipTie.dev
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