Does Being Mentioned on High Traffic Pages Influence AI Mentions?

By Patrick Stox

Technical SEO at Ahrefs

Reviewed by

Ryan Law

July 3, 2025

28 Linking websitesArticle performance data from Ahrefs

Contents

Key takeaways
The nerdy data

Does being seen more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining "being seen" or web visibility as the estimated total monthly organic search traffic to all pages that mention the entity.

These are prominent pages on the web, with a lot of visibility. Having your brand present on these pages means you likely have more credibility, that you’re a known brand.

I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.

Let’s dig in.

Contents

Key takeaways
The nerdy data

Key takeaways

I’ll give the usual correlation does not equal causation disclaimer.

I didn’t think this would be any kind of direct signal, but I was expecting fairly strong correlations here. Google AI Overviews shows a moderate, nearly strong correlation. Perplexity is a weak correlation but close to moderate. ChatGPT shows a weak correlation.

As we’ve seen in other studies, Google favors brands. Perplexity always seems to be more balanced. I think ChatGPT leans heavily on partnerships for top citation sources.

The nerdy data

Here are the Spearman rank correlations for web visibility vs. AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:

AI Assistant	Spearman ρ	Correlation
Google AI Overviews	0.55	Moderate
ChatGPT	0.20	Weak
Perplexity	0.35	Weak

Final thoughts

It will be interesting to see how this changes when we run this for a larger number of websites.

Make sure you check out Brand Radar. Brand Radar isn’t just another LLM visibility monitor, we track a large amount of queries across all of these systems and you can query for any product, service, or brand and compare vs competitors. It’s more like Site Explorer than it is Rank Tracker.

Plus we have the web visibility index so that you can see how you’re talked about online and the search demand index to see how popular you are in searches.

Post byPatrick Stox

Patrick Stox is an independent SEO consultant. Former Product Advisor, Technical SEO, and Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. Before that he was a Technical SEO at IBM for many years, worked at an agency, had his own consultancy, and was in-house at a B2B company. A long time ago he started his career as a developer.

He’s an organizer for the Triangle SEO Meetup, the Tech SEO Connect conference, he runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit.

Patrick was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and reviewer for the 2022 chapter. He helped define the role of Search Marketing Strategist for the US Department of Labor. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The Art of SEO 4th Edition.

He’s spoken at 100+ industry events including Pubcon, SMX, Tech SEO Boost, Ad World, Digital Summit, and many more. He’s written 100+ articles for industry sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, MarTech, and right here at Ahrefs. He was a finalist for SEO Speaker of the Year and SEO Contributor of the Year at the 2018 Search Engine Land Awards. He was also an EzineArticles Platinum author back in the day and still has the mug to prove it.

Patrick has judged nearly a dozen search awards for multiple years including the US Search Awards, UK Search Awards, and Interactive Marketing Awards. He participated in and documented the world’s largest SEO contest to date, the Wix SEO Hero contest which he arguably should have won.

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