The Single-Owner Discount: Provenance Concentration and Epistemic Class Reproduction in Generative Search

Generative search systems operate through a stratified pipeline in which document retrieval and answer composition are governed by separable mechanisms. A document may be indexed, retrievable, and snippet-eligible while remaining systematically excluded from generative composition. This paper develops a working architectural hypothesis for this gap and names a structural consequence not yet described in the literature: a single-owner discount under which an internally dense body of work attributed to one provenance owner is treated as weakly corroborated, regardless of internal coherence or factual quality, while equivalent content distributed across multiple institutional owners is treated as authoritative.…