Why ranking on Google doesn't mean ChatGPT names your product

A position on Google and an AI answer are different things

On Google, your page has a place in a list. You might be fourth for “crm for small sales team” and stay near there for weeks.

An AI answer works differently. ChatGPT writes a few sentences and names a handful of products. You’re either in that answer or you’re not. And the answer changes each time someone asks. In SparkToro and Gumshoe’s test of about 3,000 runs, the same list of brands came back twice less than once in 100 tries (Search Engine Land).

So a product can do well on Google and still be missing from the answer:

1. Paperwren: the CRM for growing teams
2. Quillstack: a CRM that lives in your inbox
3. Brindle CRM: pipelines and reports
4. Kettlebook: the CRM for small sales teams

Kettlebook is fourth on Google.

For a small sales team, Paperwren is the usual pick: simple pipelines and a free plan. Quillstack suits teams that work from their inbox, and Brindle CRM is worth a look if you need reporting.

Kettlebook was not named.

Agencies run into this mix-up all the time. On Reddit, one marketer wrote that “most clients come in assuming that if they rank well on Google they should automatically appear in AI answers” (r/DigitalMarketing).

How often do top Google results show up in AI answers?

Less often than you’d think, even on Google itself. Ahrefs studied 863,000 keywords in April 2026. It found that only 38% of the pages quoted in Google’s AI Overviews ranked in the top 10 for the same search, and 31% didn’t rank in the top 100. In its July 2025 study, the top-10 figure was 76%. Ahrefs changed how it detects quotes between the two studies, so part of that drop may come from the change (DesignRush, on Ahrefs’ study).

Ahrefs puts the gap down to what’s called “query fan-out”. Google’s own guide says its AI features may run “multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources” (Google Search Central). So the answer to “best CRM for a small team” can draw on pages that rank for other, related questions: pricing, integrations, “alternatives to” searches.

Where does ChatGPT get the products it names?

From many places besides your website. AirOps looked at which kinds of pages AI tools quote most. “Best of” lists came first, with 21.9% of quotes, and 80.9% of the lists quoted were on other people’s sites. Software leans on them more than any other industry: 35.37% of the pages AI tools quoted about software were “best of” lists (AirOps).

Review sites count with buyers too. G2 found that buyers trust an AI answer more when it draws on review sites than on anything else (G2). And what other sites say about you seems to matter more than who links to you: a summary of an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands reports that mentions of a brand across the web line up with AI visibility about three times as strongly as links do (Medium). That’s a link between two things, not proof that one causes the other, and we couldn’t check the exact figures.

Why can Google read your pricing page when ChatGPT can’t?

Many software sites are JavaScript apps: the page arrives nearly empty, and a script fills in the words. Google’s crawler runs that script. Most AI crawlers don’t. A study by Vercel and MERJ found that “none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript,” apart from Google’s and Apple’s (Vercel). A 2026 review of the evidence warns against loading pricing tables or FAQs only in the browser (TripleDart).

So your pricing page can sit high on Google while ChatGPT’s crawler sees an empty page, and AI tools have to take your prices from wherever else they find them. How to let AI tools read your site shows you how to check.

Does SEO still matter?

Yes. In G2’s survey, about half of B2B software buyers still start with Google at least as often as with a chatbot (G2). And Google’s AI features only quote pages that Google has indexed and is allowed to show in its results (Google Search Central). Good SEO is the floor.

But Google traffic alone is a weaker signal than it was. HubSpot reports that organic traffic to the websites of nearly 300,000 of its customers fell 27% in a year (HubSpot). Pew Research Center studied the browsing of 900 US adults: people clicked a regular search result on 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, against 15% when it didn’t (Pew Research Center). Google called that method flawed. Either way, more buyers now read an answer instead of clicking through a list.

As one person put it on Reddit: “SEO still matters, but AI visibility adds a second layer” (r/ArtificialInteligence).

What should you do about it?

Treat it as two jobs that share some of the work:

1. Check both. Look up your Google positions for your buyers’ questions, then ask the same questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Here’s how to check AI answers.
2. Make your pricing page and docs readable without JavaScript, and make sure no AI crawlers are blocked by mistake.
3. Get mentioned where AI tools look: the “best of” lists, review sites and comparison pages for your category. See where AI gets its answers about software.
4. Write the comparison and “alternatives to” pages buyers search for, fairly and with dates, so there’s a page with your facts on it when they ask.

If you pay an agency for SEO, ask them to show you AI answers next to your Google positions. The two are related, but they’re not the same report.

That’s the job outshone does each week: we check your Google positions and the AI answers side by side, pick the jobs that help with each, and do most of them. See how it works.