A detailed industry study has revealed a weak connection between strong search rankings in Google and brand mentions in ChatGPT responses, suggesting marketers may need a separate strategy for generative AI platforms.
Search Success Fails to Carry Over
The analysis, conducted by Chatoptic[1], covered 1,000 queries across five competitive markets, including car insurance, credit cards, hotels, online courses, and web hosting. Although the selected brands consistently held first-page positions in Google, they appeared in ChatGPT answers only about six times out of ten. In four cases out of ten, the overlap disappeared altogether.
Numbers That Tell the Story
The link between ranking in Google and order of mention in ChatGPT was close to nonexistent. With browsing switched on, the correlation was just 0.034; with browsing off, it dropped slightly to 0.022. In other words, a top search position did not reliably place a brand at the start of ChatGPT’s recommendations.
Some brands performed better than others. Coursera, for example, appeared in both environments more than 85 percent of the time, while Hostinger showed up in less than a third of cases. Online course providers had the strongest alignment as a group, at 65 percent, while hotel booking platforms ranked lowest at 58 percent.
Why the Platforms Differ
The divergence stems from how the two systems operate. Google indexes pages and ranks them using signals like backlinks and content authority. ChatGPT builds its answers through language modeling and contextual reasoning. This difference means the same keyword dominance that secures visibility in Google can be irrelevant to an AI model that interprets intent differently and selects brands on semantic grounds.
Study Design
To test alignment, researchers identified the leading SEO performers in each sector and transformed their most competitive keywords into natural-language prompts. These were run through ChatGPT with and without web browsing, using U.S.-based proxies to match Google’s market. Prompts were also assigned to personas such as students or business travelers to capture varied user perspectives. Results were then measured by brand presence and by ordering within each list of mentions.
What It Means for Marketers
The outcome reinforces that traditional search optimization cannot guarantee visibility in generative AI tools. ChatGPT’s results are driven more by its internal knowledge base than by current search rankings. This gap is giving rise to a new discipline being described as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which aims to improve brand mentions inside AI-generated answers rather than search result pages.
The Takeaway
Search and AI are shaping online discovery in different ways. While SEO remains essential for visibility in Google, it does not secure a place in ChatGPT’s responses. For businesses, this signals the need to adapt strategies for an era where visibility is measured not only in rankings but in whether a brand is mentioned at all.
Read next: Microsoft Drops Store Fees for Independent Windows Developers[2]
References
- ^ Chatoptic (www.chatoptic.com)
- ^ Microsoft Drops Store Fees for Independent Windows Developers (www.digitalinformationworld.com)