Search-enabled assistants can retrieve current web sources before composing a response. Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG, is one common grounding approach. The exact retrieval process, index, and citation behavior vary by product, and a source link does not mean the entire answer came from that page.
Grounding gives newer and smaller businesses a possible path into an answer because the system can consult current public pages instead of relying only on older training knowledge. It does not guarantee that a particular page will be retrieved or selected.
The practical requirement is eligibility: important pages should be crawlable by the relevant search systems, current, and clearly related to the question. After that, selection still depends on the engine, prompt, source set, and context.
When Perplexity returns an answer with numbered links, those sources help ground that response. Opening the links shows what each source actually supports.
Go deeper: How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search (2026).
This is part of the AI visibility work.