Chatbot citations barely track organic rankings

The chart compares how often AI search systems cite pages that already rank in Google’s top 10. The overlap is still fairly high inside Google AI Overviews, but it drops hard once you move to chatbot search.

– Google AI Overviews: 76% overlap with the top 10 in one Ahrefs study; 38% in a later report
– ChatGPT / Gemini / Copilot: about 12%
– Perplexity: about 28.6%

So classic SEO still matters, but mostly inside Google’s own AI layer. Once the answer comes from a chatbot, ranking well on Google stops being a reliable proxy for citation visibility.

That split is the practical reason AEO/GEO is not just SEO with a new label.

Data source: Ahrefs

Related read: Are we optimising for the right engine? Insights from the latest SEO / AEO research