Before the emergence of AI, Google dominated the search engine market, holding nearly 90% of global searches, while Bing and Yahoo! accounted for only a small fraction. However, with AI-powered search tools on the rise, platforms like ChatGPT are increasingly being used as alternatives.
Despite this shift, little is understood about what determines which companies appear in ChatGPT’s search results and what businesses should do to “rank” in AI-driven search queries.
To answer this question, Lexigate analyzed 10 extremely competitive keywords in the personal injury industry to look for the correlation between the top 3 Google search results and the top 3 results in ChatGPT search.
This is easier said than done. Unlike Google search, ChatGPT has no established keyword research tools. And, as we will see in a moment, the results ChatGPT displays for the same search query are highly volatile at any given moment.
To overcome this obstacle, we paid ten individual freelancers to perform the same set of ten queries to ChatGPT and record what they were shown. We then compared these search results to the top Google listings for the same queries using Semrush.
Houston, We Have Correlation
As shown in the chart below, law firms appearing as Google’s #1 organic search result appeared as one of ChatGPT’s top 3 results 13% of the time, followed by 9% and 8% for Google’s #2 and #3 listings, respectively. In short, having a top-ranked website in Google does indeed seem to boost your chances of appearing in the same query in ChatGPT.
This is good news for firms investing in traditional, organic SEO. These results imply that ChatGPT uses similar ranking factors to Google and that improving your standing in Google will have spillover benefits in the form of additional traffic you might receive from ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is Consistently… Volatile
Asking ChatGPT the same question ten times and taking the top 3 results each time produced between 12 and 17 unique listings. This was, on the whole, quite consistent across the ten queries we tested, with no meaningful outliers.
ChatGPT’s Volatility Spreads the Wealth
On Google, rankings tend to be more consistent over short periods of time, and the top few organic search results get the vast majority of the clicks. ChatGPT, however, rotates between a greater number of results and varies, which appear at the top of the list, giving much greater exposure to results that are “lower down.”
For each search query, we analyzed which firm (or firms, if there was a tie) appeared most frequently across our repeated searches. The most consistently successful firm was Jim Adler, The Texas Hammer, who appeared in the top 3 ChatGPT search results for “Houston Car Accident Lawyer” roughly 23% of the time.
This is remarkable because it means that even the very top performer did not appear in the top three ChatGPT search results for ~77% of searchers. In this respect, ChatGPT is taking a dramatically different approach than Google, which has historically attempted to consistently present what its algorithms determined to be the “best” result. In contrast, ChatGPT (in part because of how large language models work and benefit from allowing for variability) effectively has a “pool” of potential results and selects from them with far more variability.
As an aside, we wouldn’t be surprised if someone repeating our experiment ended up getting different results for the “top” listed firm than we did. The probabilistic nature of large language models almost guarantees it, and underscores the variability present with ChatGPT results.
What Does this Mean for Marketers?
Marketers must continue adapting their strategies as search engines, including large language models, evolve.
Here are five aspects we suggest focusing on:
1. Continue leveraging Google’s guidelines best practices
The correlation between Google’s top-ranking pages and ChatGPT’s top results suggests that improving your Google rankings will also enhance visibility in ChatGPT’s search results. Marketers should continue investing in traditional SEO practices, such as optimizing for keywords, building high-quality backlinks, and producing valuable content, as these efforts may lead to spillover benefits in ChatGPT-driven traffic.
2. Embrace volatility and broader visibility by focusing on helpful content
Unlike Google, where rankings are relatively stable, ChatGPT rotates results frequently, giving more exposure to a broader range of companies. This means businesses that may not rank at the very top on Google could still gain visibility on ChatGPT. Marketers should focus on consistently creating relevant, high-quality content to increase their chances of appearing in ChatGPT’s “pool” of results, even if their Google rankings are not at the very top.
3. Monitor ChatGPT-specific trends, including your company’s performance
The variability of ChatGPT search results requires marketers to adapt their strategies to stay competitive. Regularly testing and analyzing how your brand appears in ChatGPT queries can help identify patterns and opportunities for optimization. Collaborate with freelancers or third-party tools to experiment with queries and refine your approach based on ChatGPT’s tendencies to serve diverse and varied results.
4. Create unique content tailored to the end user
Focus on producing engaging formats such as infographics, case studies, interactive tools, and expert-driven insights. These types of content increase shareability and credibility and enhance your overall user experience, improving your chances of being referenced in AI-generated responses.
5. Optimize for AI-search
AI-powered search tools prioritize conversational, intent-driven queries over traditional keyword-based rankings. Restructure content to better align with NLP patterns and add schema markup, FAQs, and overall more context to user queries.