// citation patterns

Source: Search Engine Journal

ChatGPT's citation patterns are shifting toward primary sources—government health databases, regulatory documents, research repositories—while deprioritizing explainer and aggregator content that dominated earlier rankings. This reflects both technical improvements in retrieval and a realignment in what gets surfaced: as the model becomes more useful for fact-retrieval than narrative synthesis, the business model for SEO-optimized content farms erodes while institutional data providers gain distribution leverage. The advantage goes to whoever controls the authoritative dataset, not necessarily to whoever is most accurate.