Why do AI search tools keep citing the same brands over and over? Has anyone figured out the trust loop?

I have been tracking which brands show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for queries in my niche over the past few months. One pattern keeps standing out: the same 5-10 names appear again and again, while hundreds of other legitimate sites barely get a mention.

At first I assumed it was just about domain authority. But some of these frequently cited brands are not even the biggest in their space. They just seem to have cracked something about how AI tools decide who to trust.

Here is what I have noticed so far:

- Brands that get cited once tend to keep getting cited. It is almost like a compounding effect

- Having your brand mentioned naturally across forums, news sites, and niche publications seems to matter more than raw backlinks

- Sites that only exist on their own domain without much external presence rarely show up, no matter how good the content is

- The gap between "mentioned by AI" and "invisible to AI" feels much wider than the gap between page 1 and page 2 on Google

This makes me think there is some kind of trust loop happening. AI tools cite you because you are already being referenced in places they crawl, and the more they cite you, the more you get referenced elsewhere.

My questions:

1. Has anyone here intentionally tried to break into this cycle? What worked?

2. Do you think it is more about volume of mentions or quality of the sources mentioning you?

3. For those tracking AI citations, how long did it take before you saw a compounding effect?

4. Is anyone seeing newer or smaller brands successfully break into AI search results, or is it mostly established players?

I feel like this is going to be a huge part of digital strategy going forward, and most people are still focused only on traditional SEO. Would really appreciate hearing what others are seeing.