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.