Somewhere between typing your question and reading your cards, something happens that most sites never explain. Here is the whole sequence, without mystique and without tech jargon.
Step one: your question becomes context
When you write a question, it is not treated as a search query. It becomes the frame that everything else hangs on, the difference between reading the Tower as a job worry and reading it as a relationship worry.
This is why vague questions get vague readings. A question like "will he text me" gives the model almost nothing to work with, while "what am I actually hoping for in this situation" gives it a whole landscape. If you want to get better at this part, we wrote a guide on how to ask tarot questions.
Step two: the draw is genuinely random
The cards are pulled by a random number generator, the same category of tool that shuffles a music playlist or rolls dice in a video game. It does not read your question first and then pick something dramatic. The Tower does not appear because you mentioned a breakup.
Reversals, when a spread uses them, are decided by the same coin flip logic. Each card gets an independent chance, so a reading with four reversals is not a warning, it is just how the shuffle landed that time.
The spread you choose decides how many cards come out and what each position means. A three card spread draws three, the draws ten, and a works with a much narrower question shape.