AI Doesn't Recommend the Best Product. It Recommends the Best Explained Product.

A simple bubble tea experiment completely changed how I think about AI recommendations. Last week, I asked ChatGPT a question that seemed almost impossible to get wrong. "What are the best bubble tea brands in my city?" Surprisingly，some of the recommended brands were companies I had never heard of before. A few weren't even available in the cities I had lived in. After asking the same question to Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, I noticed something interesting that many of the same brands which I'm not familiar kept appearing. AI Isn't Judging Your Brand Humans recommend products because they have experiences. But AI does none of those things. It doesn't know whether one brand actually tastes better than another. Instead, it tries to generate the most statistically reliable answer based on the information it can understand. So, AI doesn't recommend the best brand. It recommends the brand it understands best. The Experiment That Changed My Perspective Once I realized this, I started paying closer attention. I didn't only test bubble tea but also the restaurants, beauty brands, consumer electronics, and ravel recommendations. Again and again, I noticed a pattern. Brands that consistently appeared in AI recommendations usually had several characteristics: Clear product descriptions Well-structured websites Consistent public information Plenty of third-party coverage Easy-to-understand positioning Meanwhile, some excellent brands barely appeared at all, because AI had much less reliable information to work with. That's when I stopped thinking about AI recommendations as opinions. They're much closer to information retrieval problems than human preferences. Consumers Are Already Changing Their Habits This matters because people are beginning to use AI differently from traditional search engines. Instead of searching "Best bubble tea near me", many people (especially the youth) now ask AI to recommend a healthy milk tea brand." The AI becomes the decision maker before the c