SEO vs GEO: why Google rankings still drive citations in ChatGPT and AI Overviews

Many teams now run two budgets for third-party content: link building for Google, and brand mentions for AI assistants. Abondance reports on a talk given on 15 October 2026 at the SEO & GEO Summit by the heads of Getfluence and Resoneo, who argue that this split often pays twice for the same article. Getfluence sells sponsored articles, so the methods carry a commercial angle.

What the data says

The starting point is a Resoneo study of 1,200 ChatGPT answers, 88,000 results and 26,900 pages. In the paid Thinking mode, about 75 percent of retrieved results come from Google; the rest comes from OpenAI’s own index, called Labrador. In the free mode the balance flips: Labrador supplies 74.7 percent of results and news sources 22 percent. A Google ranking is therefore a prerequisite for a large share of AI visibility, though the free mode relies far less on it.

Other figures cited in the talk point in the same direction:

• An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands (May 2025) found that brand mentions on the web correlate at 0.66 with AI Overview visibility, branded anchors at 0.53, Domain Rating at 0.33 and backlink count at 0.22. These are correlations; they do not establish cause.
• Surfer data on 173,902 cited URLs shows that a page ranking on the main query and at least one sub-query had a 51.2 percent chance of being cited in Gemini, against 19.6 percent for a page ranking on neither.
• Ahrefs (March 2026) found that 31 percent of AI Overview citations come from pages ranked between positions 11 and 100.
• Kevin Indig measured that 44.2 percent of citations come from the first third of a page and 24.7 percent from the last third.
• Seer Interactive found that 72 percent of AI-cited pages had been updated within the year.

According to Resoneo data from Meteoria, the average number of domains ChatGPT cites per answer also fell from 19 to 15 after GPT-5.3 Instant in March 2026.

How to build one article for both

The method presented breaks down into steps a team can apply without any specific tool.

Choose outlets that already rank and are already cited on your topic. Before buying a placement, check that the outlet is readable by AI crawlers: bots allowed in robots.txt, text present in the HTML, and no firewall returning 403 errors behind an open robots.txt. In Resoneo’s tests, GPTBot followed none of eight URLs listed only in a sitemap, so the article needs a link from the homepage or a section page.

Build the article on the Google query and its AI sub-queries. Collect the fan-out queries that assistants generate for your target prompts, check their search demand, give each sub-query its own subheading, and answer it in the first sentence below.

Place the brand early, ideally near the top of a third-party list, with a branded anchor, a distinctive attribute, a dated and sourced proof, and other options named alongside. A sentence that also cites competitors reads as neutral.

Reactivate articles already online: pieces sitting on page two of Google, cited pieces where the brand is missing, and pieces that already describe it well.

What to measure, and when

Timing differs between the two channels. In a case presented for OVHcloud, the article ranked on Google on publication day, while ChatGPT-User first visited on day three and the first brand mention came at around day eleven. The speakers stress that it covers two articles and a single brand, so it is an early signal at best. For seasonal campaigns, it argues for publishing earlier than a pure SEO calendar would.

Track three indicators per article: position and impressions in Search Console, ChatGPT-User visits in server logs, and citations from a prompt tracking tool. Then cross them. Ranks and cited: defend the URL with fresh links. Ranks without citations: restructure the page. Cited without ranking: point links at it. Neither: change outlet.

A concrete first step this week: pull the last twenty sponsored or earned articles about your brand, check which ones rank and which ones are cited, and stop renewing outlets that deliver neither.