Primary-source research on AI search visibility. Every claim has a source, a date, and an evidence trail.
ChatGPT Search creates publisher visibility through source links, web answers, and product-result surfaces. OpenAI documents the product at a high level, but public evidence does not yet support a single ChatGPT Search ranking-factor list. Brands should measure citations, answer influence, mentions, and product visibility separately.
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above some Google Search results, with links to source pages. Published measurements show AIO prevalence and source-selection behavior changing significantly between 2024 and 2026. Strong organic visibility appears relevant but is not a complete model for AIO citation.
Entity SEO for AI search means making a brand, organization, product, author, and topic relationships machine-readable and consistent across pages, schema markup, and authoritative knowledge sources. Current evidence supports entity clarity as visibility hygiene, but not as a guaranteed ranking or citation factor for AI answer engines.
AI visibility isn't one ranking problem. It's six. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Bing Copilot, and Gemini each pull from different source pools and count visibility in different units. Measure each engine separately, or you're guessing. Here's what the evidence actually shows.