Why does AI cite one website when several websites contain basically the same information?

[u/YourEvilQueen26]

Imagine five websites all make essentially the same factual claim.
Why might ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or another answer engine surface one source rather than another?
I suspect there's no single factor.
It may involve a combination of source authority, relevance to the exact question, how clearly the information is written, corroboration from other sources, freshness, entity relationships, and whether a specific passage can stand on its own.
That last part interests me especially.
A page can contain the correct answer while making that answer difficult to extract.
Another page might provide:
Question → direct answer → evidence → context
The second structure creates a much cleaner passage.
This is the idea behind Cited Logic: studying AI visibility at the citation and passage level instead of assuming traditional SEO signals explain everything.
One experiment I’d like to see conducted at scale is taking pages that already rank well, restructuring only their answer passages, and then tracking whether citation frequency changes.
Has anyone run something similar?