Google has once again confirmed that in order for Google to show your content as a citation or link in AI Mode, it generally needs to be crawled and then indexed by Google. This is the same thing for a page to be shown in Google Search, Google AI Overviews and other Google properties.
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LLMs don’t store real URLs – only token sequences.
To generate a link, they have to assemble it token by token based on probabilities.
Which means: there’s always a built-in chance the link is broken, wrong, or malformed.
That’s why reliable links require grounding – e.g. via Google Search Index or an external retrieval system.