AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini: where customers meet AI answers
Four places where customers get AI answers about brands, how each one finds information, and what that means for your visibility.
Short answer: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode live inside Google Search; ChatGPT and Gemini are assistants people talk to. Each picks its sources differently, so being visible in one doesn't guarantee being visible in another.
Google AI Overviews
The AI summary that appears above the normal results for some Google searches. It is shown only when Google decides a generated answer helps, sits alongside the classic links, and usually cites a few sources.
Google AI Mode
A separate, conversational search tab. Instead of a list of links, it answers in full and lets people ask follow-up questions. Behind the scenes it runs many related searches at once (Google calls this 'query fan-out') and typically draws on more sources than an Overview.
ChatGPT
When a question needs current information, ChatGPT searches the web and cites what it found. In our beauty study it searched in 87% of answers. For shopping, OpenAI says products can come from merchant product feeds, on-page structured data and third-party information such as reviews; Shopify stores can be included through Shopify Catalog (OpenAI help).
Gemini
Google's assistant. With search grounding available, it still answered most of our shopping questions from what the model had already learned: it searched in about 5% of answers in our main scan. When it did search, community sites such as Reddit and YouTube were among its most frequent sources.
What to do with this
| Where | What it relies on most | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews / AI Mode | Google's index, many related searches | Clear pages that answer specific sub-questions; solid SEO basics |
| ChatGPT | Live web search, product feeds | Being in the lists and expert pages it cites; complete product data |
| Gemini | Training data, sometimes search | Long-term presence: coverage, reviews, retailers, community |
Orbie measures all four, plus Perplexity, with the same questions and the same counting.