| This is a weird complaint. Let’s say I ask “who created Linux?” Claude correctly tells me Linus Torvalds, and links to Wikipedia. There are probably thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other sites that have that some piece of information. Are LLMs supposed to link to every site? Most sites do not have unique information at all, and even sites that do rarely contain only unique information. Implying that most sites deserve links because they were crawled seems like a statistical fallacy. You could say the same thing about the percent of sites crawled by Google versus ever showing up on first page of results. |
The issue arises when we move away from objective trivia and into subjective, localized buying intent, which is where the web monetizes itself.
If I ask an LLM 'who created Linux?', there is one right answer. But if I ask an LLM 'who are the best commercial roofers in Houston?', there isn't one right answer. There are dozens of highly qualified local businesses that do possess unique value, unique pricing, and unique availability.
When an LLM answers that roofing question, it typically cites 3 to 5 businesses. The other 40 legitimate roofing companies in the area are left out. My study isn't arguing that every single one of those 40 companies deserves to be in the answer; it's pointing out that those 40 companies currently have no idea they are being left out.
In the Google era, if you weren't on page 1, you could look at Search Console, see your ranking, check your backlinks, and understand why. In the AI Search era, businesses are being scraped to build these answers, but they have zero telemetry on whether they are actually making the cut. This index is just an attempt to provide that missing telemetry.