Visibility in ChatGPT: Why Your SEO Efforts Aren't Always Enough

Does your store regularly appear in ChatGPT responses when a potential customer asks about your products? A Semrush analysis of 1,094 categories shows that consistent presence is rare: only 15% of topics have a clearly dominant brand. Classic SEO metrics (brand search volume, organic traffic, authority score) do not reliably predict this dominance. More surprisingly, being cited as a source doesn't guarantee being mentioned in the answer text—the overlap is only 21%. In high-demand categories, the situation is even more fragmented, with only 11% identified leaders. Finally, a narrow lead is precarious: when a brand loses its top position, its median advantage was just 1.3 percentage points. For a PrestaShop merchant, this suggests it's useful to work on clarity and specificity in product descriptions to match buyer questions, without relying on established rankings. Visibility remains fluid, influenced by factors beyond traditional SEO.