You ask Perplexity "what's the best project management tool for freelancers?" and it gives you an answer with sources. Those little citation numbers next to each claim? That's RAG in action.
What RAG actually does
RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In plain English: the AI goes and looks stuff up before answering you.
Without RAG, an AI model only knows what it learned during training. That training data has a cutoff date. Ask about something that happened last week, and it's clueless. Ask about a new startup, and it might hallucinate nonsense.
RAG fixes this. When you ask a question, the system first searches the web (or a specific database) for relevant information. Then it feeds that information to the AI model along with your question. The AI generates its response based on what it just retrieved.
Why this matters for your visibility
Here's the thing most people miss: RAG is why AI visibility is a real game now.
If ChatGPT only used training data, you'd need to somehow get mentioned in whatever dataset they scraped years ago. Good luck with that.
But with RAG-powered search (Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing, Google AI Overviews), the AI is actively looking at current web pages. Your content from last week could show up in today's answer.
This also means the rules are different. The AI isn't just pattern-matching from memory. It's evaluating sources in real-time. Which pages does it trust? Which ones answer the question clearly? Which ones are structured in a way that's easy to extract?
How RAG decides what to cite
The retrieval part typically works like this:
- Your question gets converted into a search query
- The system searches and retrieves maybe 10-20 relevant pages
- It reads through them (or at least chunks of them)
- It picks the most relevant bits to include in its answer
- It generates a response and cites the sources it used
Not every retrieved page gets cited. Perplexity might look at 10 pages but only cite 3-4. The AI is making judgment calls about relevance, authority, and how well the content answers the specific question.
What this means for you
If you want AI tools to recommend you, your content needs to be retrievable and cite-worthy.
Retrievable means: search engines can find it, it's not behind a login wall, it's indexed and accessible.
Cite-worthy means: when the AI reads your page, it finds clear, specific answers. Not vague marketing fluff. Not walls of text with the answer buried somewhere. Direct, useful information that answers what people are asking.
The businesses winning at AI visibility understand RAG isn't magic. It's a system with inputs and outputs. Create content that's easy to retrieve and easy to cite, and you're playing the game correctly.
