Does ranking well on Google help to be cited by ChatGPT?
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Not much, and not directly. ChatGPT does not rely on Google's ranking: according to Ahrefs in August 2025, only 8% of the pages it cites appear in Google's top 10 for the same query. What matters for ChatGPT is the rank within its own search results: a page in the top three ranks is cited 7 to 8 times more often than a page beyond the ninth. A good Google ranking remains useful for Google's own AI answers, and it often goes hand in hand with brand awareness that also benefits ChatGPT; it does not guarantee being cited by ChatGPT.
For what type of question? It all depends on the question and the AI. For a question that names your brand, ChatGPT will search on your site, regardless of your ranking. For a market question, it searches using its own words in its own results, which are not Google's.
What studies measure regarding Google and ChatGPT
In August 2025, Ahrefs compared the pages cited by AI assistants to the top ten Google results for the same queries on long-tail queries. On average, 12% of the cited pages appeared in this top 10: 8.0% for ChatGPT, 8.2% for Gemini, 8.6% for Copilot, and 28.6% for Perplexity. The overlap with Bing's top 10 was barely higher: 10% on average, 8.1% for ChatGPT, 16.6% for Copilot.
In February 2025, Seer Interactive found that 87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing results, and 56% matched Google results. But the study was based on a limited sample, which the authors themselves describe as directional, and it counted up to the top twenty results. The two studies diverge mainly in their scope; neither shows that a good Google ranking gets you cited by ChatGPT.
ChatGPT sometimes uses Google, but it is not the rule
An experiment reported by Semrush in August 2025 placed an invented term on a page accessible only to Google's robot: ChatGPT then cited it in its paid version. ChatGPT can therefore access Google results under certain conditions. The frequency of this reliance remains unknown, and the experiment says nothing about the weight of rankings.
On OpenAI's side, the documented condition is of a different nature: to appear in ChatGPT's search answers, a site must allow its OAI-SearchBot robot. A site that blocks it is not shown in these answers. This is an access condition, not a guarantee of citation.
What we observe: the rank that matters is ChatGPT's
We do not measure the Google ranking of pages. We do, however, measure the rank of each page in the results that ChatGPT's search returns to it. This rank dominates its choice: a page in the top three ranks is cited 6.9 times more often than a page beyond the ninth across about ten sectors in French, 8.5 times in English, and of the same order of magnitude on our first corpora.
These results come from the search used by ChatGPT, with the words it wrote itself, often in English and often with the name of a source. A page can be first on Google for the user's question and absent from the results of these reformulated searches. This is why Google ranking and ChatGPT citation overlap so little.
For Google's AI answers, ranking matters more, and less and less
In Google's AI Overviews, the connection with ranking is stronger, but it is weakening. An earlier study by Ahrefs found that about 76% of citations came from the top 10. In March 2026, on a dataset twice as large, Ahrefs measures only 37.9%, compared to 31.2% for positions 11 to 100 and 31.0% beyond. The two studies do not have the same methodology, so the comparison should be taken with caution; Ahrefs attributes the decline to splitting questions into sub-searches.
Google indicates for its part that there are no additional requirements to appear in its AI answers: you only need to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. Good Google SEO therefore serves Google's AI answers, without guaranteeing them. Its generative AI guide, updated on July 10, 2026, summarizes it: SEO best practices remain relevant, because these features rely on Google's search ranking and quality systems.
What this changes for a business
Classic SEO retains its value for Google and for Google's AI answers. But for ChatGPT, you have to think in terms of reformulated searches: what questions the AI asks itself, with what words and in which language, and which pages rise to the top of those results. The OAI-SearchBot crawler must also be able to read the site.
Above all, ChatGPT looks for sources whose names it knows. Being mentioned by recognized sources in your field carries more weight for it than gaining a few places on Google.
What we do not know
We do not measure the Google ranking of the pages we observe. ChatGPT's reliance on Google is only known through occasional experiments. Our rank measurements are based on the GPT-5 API with web search.
Sources
- Ahrefs, Louise Linehan — overlap between AI search and the top 10, .
- Seer Interactive, Christina Blake and Alisa Scharf — citations from SearchGPT and Bing results, .
- Semrush, Rachel Handley — ChatGPT uses Google (Backlinko experiments), .
- OpenAI — OpenAI crawlers, .
- Ahrefs, Louise Linehan — AI Overviews citations and the top 10, .
- Google Search Central — "AI features and your website", .
- Google Search Central — "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see "How we measured".