Following the cosmetics industry, this time we investigated the supplements and health-food industry. For 30 industry-specific queries, we compared Google's top 10 search results against the URLs actually cited by ChatGPT and Gemini.
Two queries with the biggest gap
Here are two queries where SEO rankings and AI citations diverged significantly.
Example 1: "What supplements do you recommend for people who get tired easily?"
Actual sites appearing per source for "What supplements do you recommend for people who get tired easily?"
Only 1 ChatGPT citation (h-cl.org) and 5 Gemini citations matched the SEO top 10. amclinic.tokyo and sixthsenselab.jp, which ChatGPT cited repeatedly, appeared in neither the SEO top 10.
Example 2: "What's the difference between supplements and Foods with Function Claims?"
Actual sites appearing per source for "What's the difference between supplements and Foods with Function Claims?"
Source
Sites that actually appeared
SEO Top 10
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare / Tokyo Metropolitan Consumer Living Center / Komeito (political party) / Morishita Jintan / Nestlé Health Science, and others
ChatGPT citations (1)
tenmaru.jp
Gemini citations (14)
Consumer Affairs Agency (caa.go.jp) / Japan Medical Association (med.or.jp) / Foundation for Longevity Sciences / fancl.co.jp, and others
The SEO top 10 included a page from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, but neither ChatGPT nor Gemini cited it. Instead, Gemini cited pages from the Consumer Affairs Agency and the Japan Medical Association — neither of which appeared in the SEO top 10. This shows that even a government page isn't guaranteed to be cited by AI.
Overlap, SEO-only, and GEO-only: concrete examples
We organized the results of the two queries above by how they appeared across SEO and AI.
Real examples of domains that overlapped, appeared in SEO only, or appeared in GEO (ChatGPT/Gemini) only
Even an official brand site and a major e-commerce site were never cited by AI
2. SEO only
Supplements vs. Foods with Function Claims
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (mhlw.go.jp) / Tokyo Metropolitan Consumer Living Center
An example where even government pages were never cited by AI
3. GEO only
Supplements for fatigue
amclinic.tokyo / sixthsenselab.jp (ChatGPT only)
Not included in the SEO top 10
3. GEO only
Supplements vs. Foods with Function Claims
Consumer Affairs Agency (caa.go.jp) / Japan Medical Association (med.or.jp) (Gemini only)
Government and medical-association pages that never appeared in SEO
We saw a similar tendency in the cosmetics-industry investigation, but this time, the fact that "having a government page in the SEO top 10" doesn't mean AI will cite it came through even more clearly than it did for cosmetics.
Aggregate results across all 30 queries
ChatGPT × SEO Top 10 overlap rate
13.6%
18 of 132 total citations
Gemini × SEO Top 10 overlap rate
25.2%
127 of 504 total citations
Total citations, matches with the SEO top 10, and overlap rates for ChatGPT and Gemini
Metric
ChatGPT
Gemini
Total citations (across all 30 queries)
132
504
Matches with the SEO top 10
18
127
Overlap rate
13.6%
25.2%
Queries with zero citations
2 (how to choose a lactic-acid-bacteria supplement; how to choose a DHA/EPA supplement)
0
Compared to the cosmetics industry (ChatGPT 15.0% / Gemini 29.9%), the supplements industry showed a slightly lower overlap rate for both AIs. The number of queries where ChatGPT returned zero citations also rose from 1 (cosmetics) to 2 (supplements).
What the 30 supplement-industry queries showed
In the supplements industry too, the overlap between SEO-ranked sites and AI's actual citations was low. In particular, we saw cases where a government page ranking in the SEO top 10 (such as the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) was never cited by AI at all, while a different government or specialist agency's page was cited instead. This is a difference we didn't see in the previous cosmetics-industry investigation.
Separately from SEO rankings, Genview's Query Improvement feature lets you continuously track how often your brand is mentioned and cited in AI answers — based on actual citation counts rather than a proprietary score — across multiple AI models, with a focus on ChatGPT and Gemini.
Can SEO alone cover GEO as well? Next, we'll run the same test in another industry, under the same conditions.
We haven't published the full details of this investigation, but if you'd like to see the individual data for all 30 queries, please feel free to get in touch here.