What is the difference between ChatGPT Search and Google AI Overview?

ChatGPT Search and Google AI Overviews look different and serve different audiences, but they share the same underlying logic: synthesize an answer from authoritative sources and present it as the user’s first read. ChatGPT Search lives inside the ChatGPT chat interface and runs retrieval across the web as users converse with the model. Google AI Overviews appear at the top of a standard Google results page for queries the system thinks warrant a summary, drawing from Google’s index. The distribution differs (ChatGPT users versus Google users), the prompt patterns differ (conversational versus keyword), but the source mechanics rhyme: both engines weight authoritative domains, structured data (tags in a page’s code that tell engines what the content is), and Wikipedia heavily, and both reward the kind of source-layer work (improving the sources the engines read, not the engines themselves) that the AI reputation discipline is built around.