Does Google's AI Overviews rely more on our existing organic-ranking signals than ChatGPT does, meaning our regular SEO work matters more for one engine than the other?
Google's AI Overviews lean directly on Search ranking signals; ChatGPT does not. AI Overviews and AI Mode run a query fan-out across Google's own search systems (per Google Search Central, September 2026), so organic strength carries over. ChatGPT retrieves through OAI-SearchBot, its own crawler and index (per OpenAI's bot documentation, September 2026). SEO budget pays twice on Google, once elsewhere.
| Criterion | Google AI Overviews / AI Mode | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| Retrieval source | Google Search systems, query fan-out across subtopics (per Google, Sep 2026) | OAI-SearchBot index; ChatGPT-User for live fetches (per OpenAI, Sep 2026) |
| Does organic rank help? | Directly (same systems) | Indirectly at best |
| Preview controls | nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, noindex (per Google, Sep 2026) | robots.txt directives; ~24h to take effect |
| What you fix first | Rankings for the underlying subtopic queries | Crawler access, then page substance |
The verdict. Rank work pays twice on Google and once everywhere else, so a mid-market store with finite budget still funds classic SEO first, then treats ChatGPT visibility as a crawler-access and content-substance problem rather than a ranking problem. The profile this is right for: any merchant whose category still gets meaningful Google search volume, which is nearly all of them.
The detail most teams miss. Query fan-out means AI Overviews are not ranking your page for the user's literal question. Google issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources (per Google Search Central, September 2026). A page that ranks well for the head term and poorly for the five sub-questions around it will lose the Overview to a competitor who covered the sub-questions.
Where the comparison misleads. "ChatGPT doesn't use Google" gets read as "SEO doesn't matter for ChatGPT." The signals that make a page rank (genuine substance, clean structure, a crawlable server-rendered page) are the same signals that make a page usable to any retriever. Different system, same hygiene.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Fund SEO as the base layer and AI visibility as a measurement layer on top. Reversing that order is how stores end up with a dashboard full of AI metrics and no underlying pages worth citing.
- What we’ve seen: The most common defect we find is not a ranking problem at all; it's a storefront whose product content only exists inside an app's injected markup, so neither system reads it from the page.
- Where we disagree: The GEO vendor pitch positions AI search as a replacement discipline needing a new budget and new tooling. Google published the opposite in its own documentation: the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features. We take Google at its word here.
- What this page adds: that the two engines diverge on ranking dependency specifically, and that query fan-out changes which queries you need to rank for.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-13.