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AI Journey//4 min read

Do You Need to Rank on Google to Be Cited by ChatGPT?

I looked at the studies comparing Google rankings with the sources ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite. The answer depends a lot on which AI you ask.

Do You Need to Rank on Google to Be Cited by ChatGPT?

This week I set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for this blog. Both are about classic search engines. But more and more people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of searching, which raises a simple question: does a good Google ranking still help you get cited in their answers?

I went through the studies I could find. They don't agree on the exact numbers, but they agree on the direction.

Quick Answer: Ranking on Google helps, but much less than most people assume, and it depends on the tool. Ahrefs found that only about 12% of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were in Google's top 10 for the same question, and for ChatGPT alone it was around 8%. Perplexity is the exception: roughly one in three of its citations were in Google's top 10. A separate study by Search Atlas found the same pattern at the level of whole websites.

01.Do you need to rank on Google to be cited by ChatGPT?

Not really. Ranking on Google helps, but much less than most people assume. Only about 12% of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were in Google's top 10 for the same question, and for ChatGPT alone it was around 8%. Perplexity is the exception: roughly one in three of its citations ranked there.

02.What did the studies find?

The largest study I found is by Ahrefs, an SEO software company. It tested around 15,000 prompts and compared the links the AI tools cited with Google's top 10 results for the same prompt. Only 12% matched. For ChatGPT the figure was about 8%. Perplexity was the outlier, at close to one in three.

Search Atlas, another SEO company, compared 18,377 matched questions in autumn 2025 and looked at whole websites rather than single pages. According to the coverage in Search Engine Journal, the typical overlap with Google was about 25 to 30% for Perplexity, 10 to 15% for ChatGPT and around 4% for Gemini.

There is also a Bing question. Ahrefs refers to a study by Seer Interactive which found that 87% of the citations in ChatGPT's search matched Bing's top 10, against 56% for Google. Some SEO specialists think that has since changed. Nobody outside OpenAI knows for sure which index it uses today.

03.Why do the numbers differ so much?

The studies measure different things. Some compare exact pages, others whole websites. Some look at Google's top 10, others at the top 100. When Ahrefs ran a separate test on short, simple questions, Perplexity's overlap with Google's top 100 was over 90%. So the same tool can look very close to Google or very far from it depending on the method.

The sources also move quickly. 5W, a PR agency that collects data from other studies, reports that Reddit's share of ChatGPT's citations fell from around 60% to around 10% within a few weeks in 2025. I wrote about Reddit and AI citations in January. If 5W's figure is right, that advice already needs an update.

All of these are commercial studies by companies that sell SEO or PR services. I treat them as useful signals, not as settled facts.

04.What should a small blog do about it?

For a small blog like mine, three things seem reasonable.

  1. Keep doing normal SEO. It still matters for Google and, it seems, for Perplexity. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, which I set up this week, are part of that.
  2. Don't assume Google covers ChatGPT. A page can rank well and still never be cited, and the other way round.
  3. Check the AI tools directly. Ask them the questions your pages answer and see who they cite. It is slow, but it is the only way to know. I described some tools for this in an earlier post on AI visibility.

The old idea that ranking first on Google is the goal already felt dated when I wrote about the shift from SEO to GEO. These studies add a detail: each AI tool draws on different sources, and those sources change quickly.

Cover image generated with Krea AI.

Sources

  • Ahrefs, "Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 for the Original Prompt". ahrefs.com
  • Search Engine Journal, "New Data Finds Gap Between Google Rankings And LLM Citations" (Search Atlas study). searchenginejournal.com
  • Search Atlas, "GPT vs. Google Search: LLM-SERP Overlap Study". searchatlas.com
  • Ahrefs, ChatGPT and Google citations study. ahrefs.com
  • 5W, "AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026". 5wpr.com
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