Why are smaller brands showing up in LLM answers more than established ones?

Noticed something weird while testing prompts in my niche lately.

The brands getting cited consistently aren't always the biggest or most authoritative. They're the ones that kept showing up in the right conversations long enough that the model built confidence in them. Big brands assumed their domain authority would carry over — it doesn't work that way. LLMs don't rank pages, they recognize patterns across independent sources. A small brand mentioned naturally across forums, communities and niche publications can outperform a household name that only exists on its own website.

Anyone else seeing this in their space or is it niche dependent?