Websites are generally designed such that GET requests are side-effect free, and POST requests do have side effects. So for example searching on google is a GET request. It doesn't do anything other than serve the requested page. Logging in on the other hand has the side effect of setting cookies and probably writing some stuff to the database, so that's a POST request.

These assumptions are so baked into web software that while assuming a GET request won't do anything zany or overly stateful is probably fine, assuming the same for a POST request should probably be considered negligent.