Which Sources ChatGPT Cites When You Ask About AI Memory
By Matthew Firth, founder of ModelBrain · Oct 26, 2026 · 3 min readA chatbot answers a question about a product from that product's own pages, so here is our own proposal: a third-party page earns a citation only by publishing something the vendor page cannot, such as a measurement. On October 26, 2026 we sent seven AI-memory prompts to ChatGPT; six returned sources, every cited domain belonged to the product being discussed, and modelbrain.net was cited in none.
What we sent
On October 26, 2026 we sent seven prompts about AI memory to ChatGPT through the DataForSEO ChatGPT scraper (United States, English) and recorded every source ChatGPT attached to its answer. Image thumbnails are not counted, only the cited sources.
| Prompt | Domains cited |
|---|---|
| how do I delete a memory from ChatGPT and make sure it is really gone | help.openai.com, privacy.openai.com |
| does deleting a ChatGPT chat delete its memory | help.openai.com |
| how long does OpenAI keep deleted ChatGPT memories | help.openai.com, help-lb.openai.com, openai.com |
| how to make an AI forget something permanently | none |
| what is the best local memory layer for AI assistants | github.com (four project repositories), www.cognee.ai |
| mem0 vs zep vs local memory server comparison | github.com (Mem0 and Graphiti), help.getzep.com, www.getzep.com |
| how do I give Claude and ChatGPT the same memory | help.openai.com, chatgpt.com, learn.chatgpt.com, support.claude.com, support.anthropic.com, claude.ai |
What the table shows
Six of the seven prompts returned sources, and in all six the cited domain belonged to the product under discussion: OpenAI for ChatGPT questions, Anthropic for Claude, the Mem0 and Zep repositories and docs for their tools. The one tool-comparison prompt that cited a blog cited Cognee's own, and Cognee was one of the four tools ChatGPT recommended. No independent publisher appeared as a cited source in any answer, and modelbrain.net was not cited or named in any of them.
The prompt with no sources is the interesting one. Asked how to make an AI forget something permanently, ChatGPT answered without citing anything, split "forget" into three meanings (stop using it, delete the stored data, erase every copy), and said you generally cannot verify permanent erasure by asking the AI.
Our own proposal: win the slot the vendor page cannot fill
A chatbot answers a question about a product from that product's pages. A third-party page is cited when it holds something those pages cannot contain: a measured result, a comparison across vendors, or a way to verify a claim. That is why our delete page carries a timed test and a two-query check instead of a rewrite of OpenAI's steps, and why the Claude and ChatGPT comparison is built on three exit questions that neither vendor will publish about the other.
Reading it for your own pages
Before writing about a product, send the question you want to answer to ChatGPT and read the source list. If every source is the vendor, repeating the vendor's steps will not earn a citation. If the answer has no sources, or ends by saying something cannot be verified, that is the gap to fill with a test you can run and publish with numbers.