Do not give AI search a team of its own. If the proposal on your desk gives generative engine optimization (GEO) its own program, hire, and budget line, put that work on the SEO roadmap instead, under whoever owns search today. Then make them report it on a second scoreboard: how often ChatGPT and Google AI Mode cite you.
The reason is in our own measurement. On the same buyer question, Google and the AI engines almost never pick the same site, yet across a category they keep returning to the same sites. Split the programs and two teams work the same sites for different buyer questions. Each decides for its own board, and nobody decides between them.
That holds for a B2B software company already doing SEO on its own site and off it. Where the person who owns SEO reports rankings and will not report citations, change their remit, because a second team will not fix it. Community work on Reddit takes specialists either way, and specialists working from one roadmap are not a second program.
.png)
Weigh all of this knowing what we sell. Empact Partners runs search for B2B software companies as a go-to-market consultancy working from inside their marketing teams. We treat SEO as Search Everywhere Optimization, which reaches past Google into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and the communities they quote, and the GEO work sits on the same roadmap.
So we are an interested party, and the verdict costs us something too. If your SEO lead already reports citations per engine, you need no second team, ours included.
On the Same Question, Google and the Engines Pick Different Sites
We built the Empact Panel to track, week by week, how the AI engines answer our partners’ buyers. We run it on our own category too, on 500 questions a buyer of B2B marketing services asks, in four markets.
On 3 November we pulled Google’s first page for each of those questions and set it beside the sites ChatGPT and Google AI Mode had cited when the Panel asked them the same questions on 30 October.
For the same question, 1.8% of the sites ChatGPT cited were on Google’s first page. Google AI Mode, which searches Google’s own index, reached 7.6%. Every weekly wave since 4 October falls in the same narrow band, and at the level of the exact page the overlap all but disappears: 0.1% for ChatGPT, 1.3% for AI Mode.
.png)
Ahrefs found the same shape in August 2025, when 12% of the links ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot cited across 15,000 prompts appeared in Google’s top ten for the prompt. Our questions sit in one category and read the way a buyer talks to an assistant, and on them the overlap is lower still.
The engines do not agree with each other either. ChatGPT and AI Mode cited the same site for the same question 2.8% of the time.
Different results seem to call for different work and different people, which makes the case for two teams look settled. Our own data says the opposite one level up, where a program plans its work.
Across the Category, They Return to the Same Sites
Nobody plans search question by question. A program plans a list: the roundups worth getting into, the communities worth showing up in, the pages on its own site worth rebuilding. Compare the two boards at that level and most of the list is shared.
70.3% of AI Mode’s citations went to a site that ranks on Google’s first page for at least one of our 500 questions. For ChatGPT the figure was 44.6%.
The overlap is clearer still among the sites the engines lean on most. Of each engine’s 50 most-cited sites, 36 for AI Mode and 32 for ChatGPT also rank on page one somewhere in the set. The site an engine cites for one question is the site Google ranks for another.
Google’s first page and both engines’ citations also draw on the same three kinds of site, in different proportions: roundups and comparisons, the companies’ own sites, and communities. The companies’ own sites are the websites of the 164 companies the Panel tracks in our category.
| What the board draws on | Google’s first page | ChatGPT cites | Google AI Mode cites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roundups and comparisons | 42.2% | 20.5% | 29.5% |
| The companies’ own sites | 10.5% | 48.7% | 27.7% |
| Communities such as Reddit and LinkedIn | 14.1% | 1.2% | 21.9% |
| Everything else | 33.1% | 29.6% | 20.8% |
ChatGPT leans on the companies’ own websites, the asset an SEO program already owns and rebuilds. Google’s first page leans on roundups, which is where off-page SEO has always worked. AI Mode spreads across all three, and it is the board where communities count.
When the two boards do agree on a question, it is usually a Reddit thread. Of the 81 times AI Mode cited a site Google also ranked for that question, 56 were on Reddit.
Inside our SEO partnerships the off-page work already works from that shared list. We call the method Existing Article Outreach, EAO: we get a partner’s product into the roundups that already rank on Google, and on these numbers those are the roundups the engines read too.
For flair we built more than 500 links from DR 40+ sites in two years through publication relationships, and its monthly organic traffic grew 1600% in three. A separate GEO team would have to find those publications all over again.
“Put GEO Under SEO and Nobody Will Do It”
Whoever owns SEO is judged on rankings, organic sessions, and organic pipeline. Fold the GEO money into that remit and it turns into more posts and more links, because those move the numbers the owner is judged on. Two quarters later AI visibility is nobody’s job.
Our own record bears that out. Before AI Mode rolled out widely, one of our B2B software partners had a clean site and a content program that hit every target in its rank report. The traffic the program was meant to bring never arrived. A program scored on one board does that board’s work, so in 2025 we stopped leading our reports with rankings.
Where the objection goes wrong is the cure. A separate budget protects money, not work. Judge a GEO team on a blended visibility score and it faces the same incentive as the SEO lead: spend on whatever moves its own number fastest.
We have watched the board do that job. One B2B software partner was named in 1.5% of answers across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode in January 2026, and in 17.7% by August, on the same category questions. In January the engines already cited its own site in one answer in ten and still left its name out, a gap no rank report has a column for.
The partner’s pages were rebuilt around its buyers’ questions while we won its roundup placements, all on one roadmap and read against that citation board throughout. Qvery, our sister company, ran the daily measurement, so discount the numbers for that and check how they were collected before you rely on them.
One partnership proves nothing on its own, and nobody can say how much of the rise came from the pages and how much from the placements. What it shows is a merged plan keeping the citation work alive once the board made it visible.
One Roadmap, Read Against Two Boards
So the merged plan means one owner working one list of sites, with the two results kept apart. The commitments are concrete enough to hold anyone to, us included:
An SEO partnership with Empact Partners runs on exactly those commitments. It opens with an audit that reads both boards on the partner’s own questions before anything goes on the roadmap. A named senior GTM consultant owns that roadmap and is on the calls.
The specialists come from inside our SEO workstream, which already puts technical SEO, content strategy, off-page link building, and AI search optimization in one team of six. The Empact Panel reports citations weekly for each engine, beside the rank report, and we plan the work in quarters.
GEO work shows its first momentum in three to six months, so the first quarter’s report is a baseline and a plan rather than a verdict.
Ask for the Second Board Before You Fund a Second Team
Before you sign the GEO proposal, ask whoever owns SEO today to put a citation board beside the rank report, on the same questions, for one month. If they can produce it, the GEO work and its budget belong with them. If they cannot, the remit is what needs replacing, and that is the hire worth making.
If you are deciding who should run your search across Google and the AI engines, put a call in my calendar, and together we will see whether that should be Empact Partners.
