What the analysis shows
According to an analysis by David Konitzny, GEO researcher at Berlin start-up Peec AI, content from OpenAI's licensing partners appears to flow into ChatGPT through a dedicated pipeline. Of three configured news engines, only one, "labrador", populates a field named "provider". Through it, Konitzny identified 12 publishers with 43 domains, including Condé Nast, Hearst, Axel Springer, News Corp, Reuters and AP. Beyond news, recipes, product reviews and buying guides from sites such as Allrecipes, Tom's Guide and Welt also reach the chatbot.
Pre-generated instead of fetched live
According to Konitzny, ChatGPT does not fetch partner pages live but receives them as pre-generated summaries. Regular web pages arrive as text snippets. According to the analysis, partner entries are placed ahead of all web results in the prompt.
Preference in ranked lists
For ranked lists, the summaries name 70 percent of entries in positions 1 to 3 but only 23 percent of those in positions 7 to 10, based on 1,000 analysed cases.
Context
OpenAI had promised partners more prominent placement in ChatGPT in 2024. A study from Hamburg later found Springer media appearing far more often in the web interface than through the API. The source also notes that even partners are not always cited correctly. For companies aiming for visibility in AI answers, it may matter that licensing relationships can influence placement; whether this holds beyond the case described is not established by the available evidence.
Source: The Decoder (DE), analysis based on David Konitzny / LinkedIn.
Sources
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