ChatGPT's own search queries name brands users never typed

An independent analysis of raw traffic from a ChatGPT Plus account found the model injects brand names into its own search queries that the user never typed, in 21 of 27 tested conversations, per search consultant Suganthan Mohanadasan. Brands ChatGPT names in its query reached the final answer 68.9% of the time versus 2.1% for brands surfacing only on retrieved pages — a roughly 33x gap — while just 110 of 3,554 retrieved pages (3.1%) earned a citation at all, with citation rates falling from 5.2% at the first-listed domain to 0.3% from the sixth position on.