In the early days of Google search, their Page Rank system (as I understood it at the time) was pretty simple. Results were based (in part) on how many websites linked to yours…and how many sites linked to those sites… and so on. Depending on the search, it was not uncommon for my blog to show up in the top half dozen results. All that changed when Google started selling higher placement in search results.
Increasingly we are turning to LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity to get ‘answers’ rather than a bunch of links. With sources available upon request (or automatically). How do LLMs arrive at the sources they cite?
The answer was necessarily long so I’ve broken it into five posts. All of the content on these posts are by ChatGPT.
- Search Engines vs. Answer Engines
- Paid Influence is Baked Into the Web
- What LLMs Can’t Do
- Could ChatGPT Skip Ad-driven Sources?
- Steve’s Source Preference Profile
As I re-read and refer back to these posts, I might use the comments field at the bottom of each page.
This post introduces the five-part series.
https://www.smays.com/2025/04/llm-sources/