ChatGPT has significantly increased its reliance on primary research and governmental sources for information, while reducing citations of general explainer websites, according to a new report from Ahrefs.
The analysis of ChatGPT’s citation patterns in the United States from March to September indicated a notable shift in how the artificial intelligence model prioritizes information, impacting content visibility for various online publishers.
PubMed, a database of biomedical literature, climbed dramatically from 64th to fourth place in ChatGPT’s U.S. citations during the six-month period, Ahrefs reported. Conversely, health information site WebMD fell from 18th to 79th place.
Government health and research sites, along with regulatory bodies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), gained prominence in the AI’s responses. Product testing sites like RTINGS also saw increased citation.
During the same timeframe, several prominent explainer sites, including Britannica, Investopedia and the New York Post, dropped out of ChatGPT’s top 200 cited sources, according to the Ahrefs findings.
The citation share of social news aggregator Reddit in U.S. ChatGPT answers decreased sharply from 19.1 percent in March to 2.3 percent in September. Similarly, Wikipedia’s share declined from 14.1 percent to 2.9 percent.
The report, which analyzed 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT responses between August and September, found that 14.4 percent of these interactions involved a web search. These searching responses averaged 1.6 background queries each.
Ahrefs stated that 75.9 percent of site-specific searches targeting the 160 most-searched domains were directed at brand websites, such as apple.com or ikea.com, indicating a preference for official brand information.
The shift suggests that OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, may be refining its models to prioritize authoritative, original research and official sources over aggregated or summarized content, a move that could significantly alter search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for content creators.
Source: Search Engine Journal
