We checked what Google ranks for 8 everyday product searches in October 2026, such as "stand mixer," "hiking backpack 50l," "dog food for sensitive stomach" and "noise cancelling headphones." We took the top 10 organic results for each, 66 results in all, and sorted them by page type. 23 were store collection pages, the category pages that list many products. Only 1 was a single product page.
Independent reviews and guides, from sites like Wirecutter and RTINGS, also took 23 of the 66 spots. Forums and video, mostly Reddit, YouTube and Facebook groups, got 11. Guides written by stores and brands got 8, from companies like Petco, Crutchfield and CeraVe. The lone product page was a backpack page named exactly what the shopper had typed. The collection pages that ranked were named after the search too, such as "50L backpacks" and "sensitive stomach dog food," and not after an internal category.
Google layered other results on top. Product listing units, its shopping carousel, appeared on 7 of the 8 searches, and so did an AI Overview, the AI-written answer box above the results. Every one of those 7 AI Overviews cited Reddit.
ChatGPT was a separate test. On October 19, 2026 we ran 8 buying questions through OpenAI's API with web search on. It cited 34 pages. 24 of them, 71%, belonged to brands and stores, and 15 of those were product pages. It cited exactly one collection page. ChatGPT looked at Reddit plenty, 73 of the 390 sources it read, but none of the 34 pages it cited was a Reddit thread.
So a store builds for two readers. Google wants a strong collection page for each category, named after the search. ChatGPT wants a product page with the specs and price written out in plain text, since it looked up details like battery life and weight on official pages one at a time.
Each test had 8 searches or questions, so read the counts as a pattern and not a rate. RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform, ran both. RankControl's AI visibility tracker tracks citations across 7 AI engines. The numbers behind this page are in the full write-up on Medium.