Original data works because it's the one thing a model can't get anywhere else — a proprietary survey, a benchmark study, or a first-party dataset becomes the single source for that fact, so any assistant or search engine answering a related question has to point back to you or repeat your number with attribution. Generic commentary on a well-known topic competes with thousands of other pages saying the same thing.
Even small-scale original data — a survey of fifty clients, a benchmark run on your own tools — can outperform a much longer generic article for citation purposes, because uniqueness beats volume in an AI-answer context.