Home / Features / Sources and follow-up questions
Before answering, an AI breaks the question down and goes looking for sources. Those two mechanics decide who gets cited. Cockpyt AI shows you the searches launched behind the scenes and the sites the answers rely on.
See my sources for free 14 days, no card requiredMost brands approach AI visibility the way they approached search: by publishing on their own site. That is necessary, and nowhere near sufficient.
A Stacker and Scrunch study from March 2026, covering 87 pieces of content, 30 brands and 8 AI platforms, found that in 64% of cases where an AI cites a brand, it relies on sites other than the brand's own: directories, comparison sites, specialist platforms, discussions. And in one case out of five, those third-party sites are its only source. What others say about you often counts for more than what you say about yourself.
Knowing which sources feed your market therefore changes the nature of the work: it is no longer only about producing, it is about being present where AI platforms already look.
Three readings of the sites feeding answers in your market, each showing which platforms use them and how they move from one scan to the next.
What do AI platforms rely on?
The most consulted domains in your market, ranked by how often they appear, with the platforms using each of them and the movement since the previous scan.
A column shows whether your own site is among the cited sources, or has just appeared there.
Where are you absent?
The sites already citing your competitors without mentioning you. This is the most directly actionable list in the tool: every line is an identified target, already validated by the AI platforms.
A counter tells you how many of these opportunities are worth targeting first.
Who do AI platforms trust?
The domains platforms return to most often in your market, regardless of who is cited on them.
It is a map of perceived authority in your sector, as it exists for AI platforms rather than as a search tool would measure it.
This is the feature that turns an observation into a work plan. A site that appears regularly in your market's answers, mentions three of your competitors and never you, is a qualified opportunity: you know AI platforms consult it, you know it covers your subject, and you know you are not on it.
Depending on your sector these will be professional directories, comparison sites, matching platforms, specialist media or community discussions. The principle stays the same: place yourself where AI platforms already go, rather than hoping they come to you.
When you ask an AI a question, it does not use it as is. It breaks it into several separate searches, launched without being displayed, and builds its answer from what they bring back. A question about choosing a provider can trigger searches on pricing, on selection criteria, on alternatives and on reviews.
These invisible searches decide what goes into the answer. A brand can be perfectly positioned on the question as asked and still be absent from the answer, simply because it covers none of the sub-searches actually launched.
Cockpyt AI records these searches at every scan, across all your questions, and groups them by how they move.
A frozen list of searches teaches you little. How they change from one scan to the next teaches you a great deal.
Searches the AI started running this week and was not running before. These are the most interesting intents to address.
An intent that has just appeared mechanically faces less competition. That is the window to capture it.
Present at the previous scan and at this one. They form the durable core of what AI platforms look for in your market.
These are the ones to be solid on, because they will come back at the next scan.
Run at the previous scan, not at this one. The AI has shifted its angle on your market.
Useful for explaining a drop in visibility that nothing on your side accounts for.
On sources, priority goes to sites that cite your competitors without you and that come back often. One placement on a domain already consulted by all three platforms is worth more than ten posts on your own blog.
On searches, prioritise the ones that recur, address each intent within the first third of the page, and structure your content as clear questions and answers. AI platforms extract passages, not whole pages. One clean answer per paragraph is more citable than a long development.
Sources explain why the ranking looks the way it does.
We record the sources attached to the answers at the moment of the scan, for each of your questions and on each platform. There is no estimate and no frozen database: these are the sources genuinely used during the query. That is also why the list changes from one scan to the next, since AI platforms do not consult the same sites week after week.
A domain consulted by all three AI platforms is a far more profitable target than one used by a single platform. This column stops you investing heavily in a site that influences one platform only, and conversely shows you the cross-cutting sources, the ones that earn you visibility everywhere.
Platforms do not all expose their internal searches in the same way. Some return them directly, others do not. The platform filter shows which ones have data available for your project. When a platform exposes nothing, we prefer to display nothing rather than reconstruct assumed searches and have you work from a guess.
Nothing, in most cases. A search seen once usually reflects the normal variability of AI platforms rather than an established intent. Prioritise the ones that recur, and the ones flagged as new that confirm at the following scan. It is movement across several scans that separates signal from noise.
No, and that is the most common mistake. Several searches often belong to the same intent and are best handled in one well-structured piece, with a section per angle. What matters to AI platforms is finding a clear answer at an identifiable place, not the number of URLs you publish.
It depends entirely on the type of site. A professional directory needs a listing, a comparison site a conversation, a specialist platform a complete profile, a media outlet relationship work. The tool identifies the targets and their priority. Approaching each of them remains human work, which you can handle in house or hand to us as part of a GEO engagement.
Create your project, run a first scan, and get the map of sources feeding the answers in your market.
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