AI SEO & AEO: Grounding Queries and Fan-Out: What Really Happens When Someone Asks an AI About Your Business
Most people picture AI search the way they picture Google: you type a question, the machine looks it up, you get an answer. One question in, one lookup, one answer out. That’s not what happens with AI search. When you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Copilot a real question, the model quietly turns your single prompt into a research project — often a dozen or more separate searches — before it writes a single word back to you. Two concepts