Understanding when AI chatbots pull from real-time search versus its trained knowledge gives you a roadmap for where to invest your brand’s AI education efforts.
Did you know that more than 50% of all AI responses come from base model training knowledge?
Picture LLMs like a library with two sections. The "live research" section gets updated daily with fresh articles and report – this is when AI does a real-time search. But most of the time, AI pulls from the "permanent collection" – knowledge baked into the model during training that won't change until the next major update.
When AI searches live, those sources become your roadmap. You can literally see where AI is looking for answers about your industry. But the other half of the time, AI is drawing from patterns it learned by reading the entire internet during its training cycle.
On average, ChatGPT relies on its training knowledge 62% of the time, and Gemini 54% of the time. There are fluctuations to this depending on the prompt, topic and personalization settings: we found that 1 out of 10 times the split was reversed, with ChatGPT relying on search 63% of the time and Gemini 62% of the time.
This gives extra weight to long term brand building. Every mention, every review, every industry conversation becomes potential training data. When your competitor gets featured in that trade publication or becomes the shining star in a subreddit, they're not just reaching today's audience – they're potentially teaching tomorrow's LLM.
Your brand's AI education strategy is about becoming part of the conversation at such scale that an LLM has confidence that your brand is the right answer when they’re responding to a user. This is similar to brand recall in people: a person needs to see your brand almost a dozen times across a variety of touchpoints before purchasing your product. Your goal is to provide AI with many examples of how your product answers consumer questions, in many different places.
Understanding how LLMs learn and respond helps you to position your brand to own the AI mentions in your category, capture AI commerce and eventually, be the brand that AI agents choose.
Methodology: We prompted ChatGPT and Gemini 16 million times across 12 verticals, from consumer goods to fintech to healthcare, tracking which responses pulled from real-time sources versus the AI’s built-in knowledge base.
