Does Being Mentioned on Highly Linked Pages Influence AI Mentions?

By Patrick Stox

Technical SEO at Ahrefs

Reviewed by

Ryan Law

July 8, 2025

44 Linking websitesArticle performance data from Ahrefs

Contents

Key takeaways
The nerdy data

Does being mentioned on highly cited web pages lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining highly cited web pages as those with more Referring Domains (RD).

These are prominent pages on the web and those that other websites have deemed worthy of linking to. 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, especially here.

I didn’t think this would be any kind of direct signal, but I was curious if there would be differences in the systems. Google AI Overviews shows a strong correlation, Perplexity a moderate correlation, and ChatGPT a very weak correlation.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that prominent brands are mentioned on pages that website owners deemed worthy enough to link to. Google favors brands and Perplexity seems to show some favoritism as well. What’s surprising is the weakness of ChatGPT here. I think they just lean heavily on partnerships for top citation sources.

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

The nerdy data

Here are the Spearman rank correlations for mentions on highly cited web pages versus AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:

AI Assistant	Spearman ρ	Correlation
Google AI Overviews	0.70	Strong
ChatGPT	0.12	Very weak
Perplexity	0.40	Moderate

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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