A study by OMcollective relayed by Search Engine Land establishes that ChatGPT cites the English pages of a multilingual website 2.6 times more than their share of organic traffic justifies, while Copilot (1.07) and Google AI (0.79) stay close to neutral. For the AI search visibility of companies in Luxembourg, where English coexists with French and German, the consequence is direct: the English version becomes the source ChatGPT cites first, even for a reader who does not speak English.
The facts
- The over-citation ratio for English reaches 2.6 on ChatGPT, against 1.07 on Copilot and 0.79 on Google AI; a ratio of 1.0 means the AI cites English at the same rate as the share of organic impressions it generates.
- In the server logs analysed, GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler, stays below the English share of organic demand; it is ChatGPT-User, the bot that fetches pages while composing an answer, that over-fetches English, with a median ratio of 2.6.
- Adding a maintained English version raises AI visibility by +122% on ChatGPT, +52% on Copilot and +9% in median on Google.
Why does ChatGPT cite English pages first?
The bias appears at live retrieval rather than at training. GPTBot does not index English more than the site's other languages. It is ChatGPT-User, active while the AI builds its answer, that fetches English first. We already documented this mechanism in our 10 golden rules of GEO in 2026: signals specific to each engine, rather than Google ranking, are what predict an AI citation. Copilot and Google AI rely on an already mature multilingual search index; ChatGPT retrieves content live, within a model whose centre of gravity remains English-speaking.
For a company active in Luxembourg and the Greater Region, the consequence is concrete. Adding a well-made English version increases the chances of being cited by ChatGPT, but only if that page stays as up to date as the French or German versions. The study cites the case of a bank whose English pricing PDF, left out of date after the local pages were updated, ended up as the source cited by the AI. An abandoned English page is never neutral: it becomes the answer served in your place.
AIxH's view
This result confirms what we observe managing multilingual accounts day to day: visibility in AI answers does not always follow Google traffic, since each engine obeys its own signals. That is precisely what our GEO agency in Luxembourg measures: a panel of queries replayed at a fixed cadence on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, language by language. The operating rule is simple: only publish an English version if you can keep it at the same pace as the others, otherwise it will become the version the AI cites in your place. An AI visibility audit is enough to establish where you stand.