A Christmas gift for €100 for my 10-year-old daughter: where does the AI go looking?
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A busy parent asks an AI for a gift idea. The response looks like a store list. But where do the names in it come from? We asked ChatGPT forty times and Claude forty times.
What the AIs answered
Without web search, both AIs draw from their classics: ChatGPT suggests Lego in 19 out of 20 responses, Claude an Instax camera in 15 out of 20.
With web search, the list changes. Lego disappears from ChatGPT's responses; instead, the game Dobble appears in its 20 responses and Janod toys in 18. For Claude, Asmodée games appear in all 20 responses, and Lego is only suggested 6 times.
Where they go looking
The pages that ChatGPT cites with web search are mostly shops and parenting advice sites. A toy shop is cited in its 20 responses; Nature & Découvertes, like the Janod brand website, in 18.
Claude, for its part, brings back through its search sites specializing in gift ideas: three of them, with pages 'gift ideas for a 10-year-old girl', appear in its 20 searches, ahead of Cultura (14) and Fnac (12).
The two AIs do not go looking on the same sites.
What this changes for a brand or a shop
The parent only sees a few names, and they arrive mostly through gift idea guides and the shops that publish these selections. A brand absent from these pages does not enter the response, even when it is well-known.
And what the AI suggests off the top of its head is not what it finds when searching: the Lego from its memory are not the games that the web brings to it.
What you can do, simply
- For a brand: be present in gift idea guides by age and budget, not just on your own website.
- For a shop: publish your selections by age and budget, dated for the season: this is the type of page that AIs cite here.
- Do not look at a single AI: ChatGPT and Claude do not read the same sites.
A limitation to keep in mind
The question was asked in June, not in December: the Christmas guides for the season were not all published, and the models have changed since. Asked again closer to Christmas, it could bring up other names.