Google Rankings Don’t Equal ChatGPT Visibility: New Study
▼ Summary
– A new study found almost no correlation between SEO strength and visibility in AI answers like ChatGPT.
– Brands ranking on Google’s first page were mentioned in ChatGPT only 62% of the time.
– Google ranking barely predicted ChatGPT position, with just a 0.034 correlation between the two.
– Enabling browsing in ChatGPT increased alignment with Google results by only 1%.
– Search and AI aren’t interchangeable, requiring separate strategies for Google SEO and generative AI platforms.
Achieving top rankings on Google does not automatically translate into visibility within AI platforms like ChatGPT, according to recent research. A new analysis by Chatoptic examined 15 brands across five different sectors and found almost no meaningful connection between traditional SEO performance and how often a brand appears in ChatGPT-generated responses.
This finding matters because many search professionals have assumed that strong SEO results would naturally carry over to generative AI environments. The data suggests otherwise. SEO tactics alone are not sufficient to secure visibility in AI-driven answers, indicating that a new approach, often referred to as GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, may be necessary.
The numbers tell a clear story. Among brands that ranked on Google’s first page, only 62% were mentioned by ChatGPT. Even more telling, the correlation between a brand’s Google ranking and its ChatGPT visibility was a mere 0.034, meaning high placement in one system hardly predicted prominence in the other.
Enabling browsing within ChatGPT only improved alignment with Google results by 1%, a negligible increase. Some brands, like Coursera and GoDaddy, showed relatively high overlap rates between 83% and 87%. Others, such as Hostinger and edX, appeared in ChatGPT far less often, with overlap rates as low as 32–34%.
By industry, online course providers showed the strongest alignment at 65%, while hotel booking sites lagged at 58%. Interestingly, the type of user query, whether exploratory, feature-based, or brand-specific, made little difference, with all categories hovering around 61–63% overlap.
The takeaway is clear: search and AI platforms operate by different rules. Success in one does not guarantee presence in the other. This divergence is where GEO is emerging as a distinct discipline, focused on optimizing for generative AI environments rather than traditional search engines.
(Source: Search Engine Land)
