Generative AIs are trained on huge volumes of text from the web. If your brand, product or service appears frequently in quality sources within the training data, the AI "knows" about you and can cite you when relevant. If it doesn't, you simply do not exist for the model.
This creates a cumulative advantage: the earlier you build presence in quality sources (blogs, news portals, Wikipedia, relevant forums), the higher your chances of making it into the next training cycles. It is a compounding effect that rewards those who start early.
In practice, this reinforces the importance of link building and multichannel presence. Having content on your own site is not enough. Your name needs to appear in third-party outlets, in forums, in articles cited by others. Every mention in a source the AI "reads" during training is a vote of confidence that can translate into future citations.