Content from OpenAI's licensing partners appears to flow into ChatGPT through a dedicated pipeline that gives it priority over the rest of the web. That's the finding of an analysis by David Konitzny, a GEO researcher at Berlin-based startup Peec AI. Of three configured news engines, only one called "labrador" populates a field named "provider." Through that field, Konitzny identified 12 publishers with 43 domains, including Condé Nast, Hearst, Axel Springer, News Corp, Reuters, and AP. Beyond news, the pipeline also feeds recipes, product reviews, and buying guides from sites like Allrecipes, Tom's Guide, and Welt into the chatbot.
ChatGPT doesn't fetch partner pages live. Instead, it receives them as pre-generated summaries, while regular web pages arrive as raw text snippets. In the prompt, partner entries are placed ahead of all web results. For ranked lists, the summaries name 70 percent of entries in positions 1 through 3 but only 23 percent of those in positions 7 through 10, according to 1,000 cases Konitzny analyzed.
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