Whether an AI assistant uses real-time web search depends on the assistant and the question, and it changes a great deal about how you get recommended. Several leading assistants -- Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google's AI answers, and ChatGPT and Gemini when they decide a query needs current information -- retrieve and read live web pages before answering, which means your current site, listings and reviews can shape the answer right now, not months from now. Others, or the same assistants on questions they judge answerable from memory, lean on training data frozen at a cutoff and refreshed only periodically, where being named depends on how well-established and widely-referenced your business already is. The practical implication is the same either way: for the browsing path you want a crawlable, readable, consistently-described site and listings so the retrieval step finds and trusts you; for the training-data path you want enough durable, corroborated presence across the web that the model has already absorbed you as a known entity. Businesses that are easy to verify win on both paths, which is why AI-visibility work targets the signals that help whether the assistant is reading you live or recalling you from memory.
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