The insight: Traditional SEO success no longer translates into visibility inside generative AI tools. According to Ahrefs research cited in a recent EMARKETER webinar, only 8% of ChatGPT’s citations and 8.6% of Google Gemini’s citations come from URLs that appear in Google’s top 10 organic results for the same query.

In other words, roughly 92% of top Google results do not appear when AI answers the same prompt. Even outlier Perplexity surfaces first-page Google links only 28.6% of the time.

The result: The SEO playbook does not carry over to what some now call GEO (generative engine optimization).

How consumers use AI: Meanwhile, LLM usage continues to climb. Major AI platforms combined attracted more than a billion monthly users, and ChatGPT alone reported over 900 million weekly users, per The Information.

Even with that surge, AI still represents only 3.3% of digital discovery time, but the content it references looks nothing like Google’s. Community-heavy sources—Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other public forums—dominate citations across AI engines. Semrush data shows that Reddit alone accounts for 40.1% of all genAI citations worldwide, followed by Wikipedia at 26.3% and YouTube at 23.5%. These are community-driven environments that typically outrank brand sites inside AI responses.

Why it matters: Marketers who rely on organic visibility are facing a new ecosystem. Strong performance in traditional rankings does not guarantee that AI assistants will surface those same pages. Since LLMs lean heavily on community-created material, brands with little presence in public forums risk limited exposure when consumers query AI tools.

The gap between SEO and AI visibility will grow as models evolve. Because generative tools rewrite answers instead of showing lists of links, the rules for influencing these responses change faster than for classic search. Even high-authority pages can be bypassed if the model finds richer context, stronger consensus, or more relevant conversation elsewhere.

This means that brands used to ranking well on Google can quickly be overshadowed inside AI responses by even smaller competitors with more active community engagement.

Key takeaway for marketers: The companies that adapt fastest will secure early advantages in the next phase of discovery. To stay visible as AI becomes a standard discovery touchpoint, marketers should:

• Track how often their brand appears in AI answers for core category prompts.
• Strengthen their presence across user-led platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and other open forums.
• Build content that clearly answers real questions, not just keyword targets.
• Treat GEO as a distinct practice rather than an extension of SEO.