Why some content gets cited by AI Overviews and others doesn't, it's not what I expected !

I've been obsessing over this question for months. I write content that ranks well on Google, but it barely shows up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. Meanwhile some shorter, less "optimized" articles from competitors get cited constantly.

After a lot of digging I think I found the pattern.

It's not about backlinks. It's not about domain authority. It's about Information Gain — specifically whether your content covers semantic concepts that competing articles miss entirely.

AI engines are essentially doing a coverage check. They pull from sources that fill the gaps in their answer, not from sources that repeat what everyone else already said.

I tested this by mapping competitor articles as embedding spaces and running persistent homology on them — basically finding the "holes" in the semantic topology. The gaps I found matched almost exactly with the concepts AI Overviews were pulling from other sources.

Has anyone else been looking at this angle? Curious what signals you've found actually move the needle for AI citation vs traditional rankings — they seem increasingly disconnected.

(Happy to share more on the methodology if there's interest)