Why it matters
Because citation and ranking have come apart, a distributor’s spec page can be quoted by ChatGPT even if it never reached Google’s first page — which is exactly why citation is worth engineering for as its own outcome.
In practice
An MRO distributor asks Perplexity, 'best replacement hydraulic seal kit for a Parker D1VW solenoid valve.' The answer is assembled from several pages, and Perplexity appends inline numbered citations [1][2][3] linking to the sources behind each claim. Two cited URLs are a small fluid-power blog and a forum thread that rank nowhere near Google's first page for that query, illustrating why a distributor can earn an LLM citation without holding a top-10 organic ranking.