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Articles by Patrick Stox
ChatGPT Has 12% of Google's Search Volume but Google Sends 190x More Traffic to Websites
ChatGPT processed 2.5 billion prompts per day as of July 2025.¹ That’s 18% of Google’s 13.7 billion daily searches, based on the 5 trillion searches per day they announced in January 2025.² While ChatGPT has nearly a fifth of Google’s query volume, people use the platforms in different ways.
Anonymized Queries Make Up Nearly Half of Google Search Console Traffic
In April 2025, anonymized queries made up 46.77% of website traffic. This number is slightly higher than our 2022 study on anonymized queries. However, that’s the average. Some websites in our research saw dramatically higher percentages of anonymized queries. Read on to see how it might impact you. The problem is that I believe Google’s classification for anonymized queries is overly broad.
8.64% of AI Overviews Appear Outside Position #1 (And as Low as Position #6)
AI Overviews aren’t always in the first position in the SERPs. For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position. See where AI Overviews appear outside of position 1 You can use the SERP features filter along with the Position filter to find some of the AI Overviews outside the top position. Head to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, navigate to the Organic keywords report and copy these filters: I asked our awesome data scientist Xibeijia Guan to find out how often they show in different positions.
Google Thinks AI Mode Is Good for Users, but the Content Isn’t Good Enough to Rank in Google
I set up some tests over a month ago to see if Google would rank content generated by Google AI Mode in the organic search results. Spoiler: it did not rank. Google believes AI Mode content is good enough to show to users in what will likely be the default search mode in the future. But the content itself doesn’t seem good enough to compete in the normal Google search results. Is it because it’s AI-generated? Is it because there’s nothing new added? Is it because it’s just not good enough?
Does Being Mentioned on Highly Linked Pages Influence AI Mentions?
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.
Google Seems More Biased Towards Big Brands Than ChatGPT and Perplexity
Does being mentioned more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining mentions as the number of web pages that mention an entity at least once. 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. I’ll give the usual correlation does not equal causation disclaimer.
Does Being Mentioned on High Traffic Pages Influence AI Mentions?
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.
Domain-Level Link Metrics May Not Be Good Predictors of AI Search Mentions
Going into this study, I suspected that domain-level link metrics would not be a good predictor for mentions. I was expecting Google AI Overviews to show more of a correlation since they may use some of the traditional search signals, whereas the other systems may not. For traditional search, usually the page-level metrics are more predictive of rankings than domain-level ones. I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
Websites With More Organic Search Traffic Get Mentioned More in AI Search
I don’t think this result will come as a surprise to anyone. Websites that get more traffic in traditional organic search also get mentioned more in AI Search. Popular sites are popular, even if the search system changes. 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.
AI Assistant Bias Revealed: Here’s Who Gets Favored & Who Gets Shunned in the New Era
AI assistants are rewriting the rules when it comes to visibility on the web. The websites they mention are chosen based on different criteria than traditional search rankings. Instead of just looking at which websites are mentioned the most, I wanted to understand whether those mentions actually match the popularity of the topics being discussed.
Meet the New Web Crawlers: AI Bots Are Closing in on Search Engine Bots
The web is being crawled more than ever, but it’s no longer just search engines doing the crawling. AI bots are soaking up all the data they can to train and power their AI assistants. The problem is that AI bots are new to web crawling. They’re still making some silly crawl decisions, bumping around, and wasting a lot of resources. We’ve already seen that AI bots are starting to be blocked by a lot more of the most trafficked websites.
Does AI Search Traffic Convert Better Than Traditional Search? For Ahrefs, Yes: 0.5% of Visitors Drove 12.1% of Signups
Search engines keep telling us traffic from AI search is better quality, but is it? At least for Ahrefs, this channel has the highest Conversion / Visit ratio. AI search visitors convert at a 23x higher rate than traditional organic search visitors for Ahrefs. The terminology in this industry is evolving. I’m defining AI search as search that happens in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
80% of Our AI Search Traffic Goes to Our Homepage, Product Pages, and Free Tools
For years, Google and Bing have told SEOs to focus on their users, create great content, and add unique insights. They’re saying the same thing for the AI era, but is it true? To answer this question, I decided to look at the referral traffic from AI Search using Ahrefs Web Analytics and compare that to traffic from Organic Search for ahrefs.com. We have a channel segment for LLMs that groups the traffic from different AI assistants together.
86% of Top Mentioned Sources Are Not Shared Across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews
Good content is good content, and top websites are top websites. These things don’t change. However, biases in the training data and partnerships can change which sources are mentioned by different AI Assistants. AI Assistants may also work slightly differently. By default, they don’t have any notion of websites and can make up sources. Looking at you ChatGPT. Some systems are augmented with search, where they retrieve documents first and they’re less likely to hallucinate results.
The 10 Most Cited Domains for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews Across 78.6M Searches
I wanted to know which websites are mentioned the most often in AI Assistants. This should give some indication of which sites are being favored by the different systems. I looked at the top 10 websites cited 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. Sidenote.
Google Is Stealing Your International Search Traffic With Automated Translations
Since the March Core update, there’s been a huge increase in Google’s efforts to automatically translate English-language webpages into other languages. The catch? These newly translated pages are hosted on a Google subdomain, so the original content creators don’t see any benefit from them. This coincides with the massive rollout of AI Overviews we saw alongside the March update. AI Overviews are now in 200 countries and 40 + languages.
Generative Engines Are Breaking Web Analytics and Hurting Their Future
Search is moving from traditional search engines to generative engines, but traffic from many of these sites isn’t being tracked properly in analytics. It’s their fault, not yours. I was looking at our LLM filter in Ahrefs Web Analytics and noticed some common generative engines missing from the list. They’re in our filters, but we aren’t seeing any data from them for sites. This invisible traffic problem comes from these systems stripping the referral value.
The SEO Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most
Ever wonder which SEO bots are the most blocked? This can impact the quality of the data the tools provide. Blocking these bots will mostly impact the link index of the tools. They won’t be able to crawl the pages, so they can’t check where those pages are linking. It doesn’t matter for traffic estimates, keyword rankings, top pages, etc. Those are built from different data sources.
Google AI Mode Is Here, But You Can't Track It Properly
Google just rolled out AI Mode to US users. I was testing if the clicks would show in Google Search Console, without any success. A post by Tom Critchlow on LinkedIn made me wonder how a click on a link in AI Mode would be recorded in analytics. The tl;dr is that clicks to links in AI mode are not being recorded at all in Google Search Console, and they’re not sending a referrer value when you click. That means they’re treated as Unknown or Direct, depending on your analytics system.
The AI Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most
AI bots power some of the most advanced technologies we use today, from search engines to AI assistants. However, their increasing presence has led to a growing number of websites blocking them. There’s a cost to bots crawling your websites and there’s a social contract between search engines and website owners, where search engines add value by sending referral traffic to websites.
Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches-A Study by Ahrefs
According to Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion users a month in Q1 2025. That would be 18.3% of all the people on the planet or 26.6% of all internet users. That’s a massive reach. In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see what we could learn and share with the marketing community. For a twist on most studies, I’ve shown how they compare to search queries overall.
How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?
Back in 2017, we conducted a study to answer a simple yet important question: How old are the top-ranking pages in Google? The results were eye-opening and became one of our most-referenced data studies. Clients and stakeholders often ask, “How long till my website (page) ranks on top of Google?” You could say “it depends” and give a lecture on all the variables like quality of the content, website strength, resources, competition… or you can use the data below.
Semantic SEO: The Advanced Skill Most SEOs Pretend to Understand
Semantic SEO sounds complicated, but it simply boils down to doing SEO without cutting corners. If you do SEO properly, you’re automatically doing semantic SEO. It’s just that most people aren’t doing it properly… It’s not a different type of SEO. You don’t need to do wildly different things.
Enterprise SEO Platform Buying Guide
Onboarding an enterprise SEO platform can be a long and difficult process. Getting rid of a bad solution once it’s integrated into your systems can be even harder. Make sure you do your homework and select the right platform for you. Choosing an enterprise SEO platform can be complicated. Let’s look at what is involved in the decision-making process.
Google Says "Links Matter Less"-We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs and Our Data Both Agrees and Disagrees
Google has said links are less important than they used to be, and most SEOs have come to accept that as true. Our findings indicate that this is true overall, but for certain types of queries, links matter more. I still believe that links should be a part of your SEO strategy, but they shouldn’t be your whole strategy. A while back, I answered the question, “Do links still matter for rankings?” by disavowing all links to a few blogs. Traffic and rankings fell, so yes, links still matter.
Bidding on Branded Terms Increases Clicks by 18.3% Original
We ran this study to find out if running paid ads cannibalize organic traffic or not. Most SEOs are against bidding on branded terms because it is believed that buying paid ads cannibalizes organic traffic and it can also impact attribution for conversions and revenue. Paid advertisers believe there is an uplift in overall traffic. Who is right?
Google AI Overviews (Formerly Google SGE): All You Need to Know
Google officially launched AI Overviews in the U.S. on May 14, 2024. Three months later, they announced that AI Overviews was rolled out to six more countries: the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. Is SEO dead and should you panic? Or is everything a big hoo-ha and there’s nothing to worry about? Here’s everything we know about Google’s AI Overviews to date: Google’s AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries for search queries.
Here's What Happened
On July 26th 2024, I exported all “toxic” and “potentially toxic” backlinks to three of our blog posts from a well-known SEO tool. There were 129 URLs in total, which I disavowed in Google Search Console. After disavowing, traffic (as reported by GSC) fell by 7.1%: Sidenote. Google began rolling out a Core Update on August 15th, which is why I cut the experiment short to only 20 days.
The Realities of In-House SEO: What to Expect and How to Succeed
In-house SEO refers to the practice of managing and executing search engine optimization strategies using a company’s internal resources, rather than outsourcing to an external agency. There’s a long-term trend of companies bringing SEO programs and expertise in-house. Companies usually want someone who is invested in the long-term success of the company and who can collaborate closely with other teams in a way that is difficult for external agencies to do.
Enterprise SEO Challenges & Mistakes You Need To Overcome Original
Whether you are working in-house at an enterprise company or you’re an agency working with enterprise clients, you’ll find that navigating the corporate landscape is complex. You may know exactly what the company needs to do in order to be successful, but actually getting things done can be a challenge. One person’s challenge is another person’s opportunity. Being able to cut through red tape and get things implemented is a super power.
Can You Spot Google Updates with XmR Charts?
Website traffic data normally looks like this: Ups and downs, peaks and troughs. If we’re doing our job properly, we generally expect traffic to trend upwards over time, but in any given month, it’s difficult to say whether a peak or a trough is worth paying attention to. Did we do something great and trigger a new phase of growth? Did we benefit from a new Google update? Or is it just normal variation, part of the natural ebb and flow of people finding our website?
Unlocking Growth Through Enterprise SaaS SEO Original
Enterprise SaaS SEO is the practice of improving the visibility and rankings of an enterprise SaaS website in search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide. It works like this: Let’s dive in. There are many reasons SaaS companies should focus on SEO. These include: Credibility. With every new touchpoint, you have the opportunity to be seen as the expert and dominant offering.
SEO OKRs: Driving Performance & Measuring Impact
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular goal-setting framework. It helps SEOs define and measure the success of their projects, teams, and individual SEOs. The objectives should be clearly defined. Some people prefer the SMART framework to make sure their goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Key results are how you track your progress against your objective. Goals are usually set at a few levels. You usually have company, team, and individual goals.
Enterprise Sites Are Where Technical SEO Shines
Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a large, enterprise company’s website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise websites are where technical SEO shines. There’s so much money at stake. One mistake can keep millions of pages out of the index or remove an entire site from search results. One fix can potentially be worth millions of dollars in revenue.
Enterprise Link Building & The Power Of Links
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and how much money is at stake. Links play a role in many of Google’s systems including Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical Than User. What It Is, Causes, & How to Fix Original
The Google Search Console status “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” means that Google chose a different URL to index than the one the user selected. This can happen when Google finds two or more pieces of content on a site that are very similar or identical. The issue will show in the Page Indexing report in Google Search Console. This is how it looks. When I check on one of our pages with this issue, I see that the content hasn’t been translated yet for either language.
The 6 Biggest SEO Challenges You'll Face in 2024
Seen any stressed-out SEOs recently? If so, that’s because they’ve got their work cut out this year. Between navigating Google’s never-ending algorithm updates, fighting off competitors, and getting buy-in for projects, there are many significant SEO challenges to consider. So, which ones should you focus on? Here are the six biggest ones I think you should pay close attention to. Make no mistake—Google’s algorithm updates can make or break your site.
Google Documents Leaked & SEOs Are Making Some Wild Assumptions Original
You’ve probably heard about the recent Google documents leak. It’s on every major site and all over social media. Where did the docs come from? My understanding is that a bot called yoshi-code-bot leaked docs related to the Content API Warehouse on Github on March 13th, 2024. It may have appeared earlier in some other repos, but this is the one that was first discovered.
What Is Enterprise Content Marketing? Strategies You Need To Be Successful Original
Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience. When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help with things like brand perception and awareness. There’s a misconception that big enterprise websites rank for everything.
The Role of SEO in Mergers and Acquisitions
SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, do due diligence and help with valuation and risk identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor migration progress, and train new teams in best practices. Acquisitions can have a dramatic impact on your search visibility. Long ago, one of the main competitors of an engineering company I was working with shut down.
Steal Our SEO API Stack For Easy SEO Automation
If you’re looking to automate boring SEO tasks or create custom SEO reporting dashboards, APIs can be a major time-saver. So, I asked our team for recommendations for a well-balanced SEO API stack that covers everything you’ll likely ever need. I’m excited to share this list with you, so let’s get straight to it.
You Can't Compare Backlink Counts in SEO Tools: Here's Why
Google knows about 300T pages on the web. It’s doubtful they crawl all of those, and at least according to some documents from their antitrust trial we learned they only indexed 400B. That’s around .133% of the pages they know about, roughly 1 out of every 752 pages. For Ahrefs, we choose to store about 340B pages in our index as of December 2023. At a certain point, the quality of the web becomes bad.
Does Adding a Related Post Section Help Your Blog? We Tested It Original
We already do a great job with internal linking on the Ahrefs blog. But we wondered if adding a related posts section would help us and whether users would use it. Our marketing team was fairly split on whether we should have a section like this and whether it would help. I’ve had great results with this personally on sites with a lot of content, and I was convinced it would help the Ahrefs blog.
Yep & Ahrefs Support IndexNow. Fresher Data, Faster Indexing, & Announcing a Game-Changing Site Audit Feature
I’m thrilled to announce that Yep, our search engine, and Ahrefs will support IndexNow along with Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, & Seznam.cz. This puts us in a unique position. Not only are we an SEO tool who will be submitting data to IndexNow, we’re also a search engine and the first and only SEO tool that will be receiving data from IndexNow. Ahrefs is giving users a reason to use IndexNow besides faster crawling and indexing in search engines.
Toxic Backlinks: SEO Woe or a Load of Baloney?
Toxic backlinks are links that some SEO tools say could hurt your website’s Google rankings. The implication is that you should disavow them to keep your site safe. But there’s some disagreement and confusion among SEOs as to whether “toxic” links are actually a thing and what, if anything, you should do about them. If you believe Google’s John Mueller, they’re not: Sidenote. John has since deleted this tweet.
Cannibalization's Good Twin (SEO Study)
At Ahrefs.com we’ve got 9.7k cases of multiple rankings. It’s when a site ranks for a keyword with more than one page. Now, classic SEO theory says that if you rank with more than one page for a keyword, it’s a cannibalization issue, and you should fix it. But when I spent a day carefully reviewing a sample of 80 keywords with multiple rankings, I found only one case that needed action. So if all other cases were not bad, maybe they were actually good?
How To Remove Backlinks (And Clean up Your Link Profile)
So, you’ve got some bad backlinks? Maybe you’ve paid for some shady links, or a competitor has targeted your website with link spam. Whatever the cause, you’ll want to know what to do next—especially if you’ve received a manual action. In this article, I’ll share how to remove backlinks and consider the different approaches for cleaning up your link profile—depending on your circumstances.
How to Visualize Ahrefs Data with ChatGPT
SEOs have access to so much data that sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do with it all. I’ve been experimenting with visualizing Ahrefs data using GPT-4, so I thought I’d share the results with you all. We’ve already launched some AI-enhanced features like search intent, but we made it even better by adding the traffic share for each intent. Check out this write-up from Si Quan for some more things we might add. For the visualizations, you’ll need GPT-4.
Enterprise SEO Metrics & How to Report On Your Successes Original
Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring these metrics helps you prove value and shows the success of your SEO program. You’ll create a lot of different SEO reports for a lot of different people in an enterprise environment. Let’s look at some of the reports you’ll want to create and the metrics to include in them for different people. Money is what businesses care about.
How To Do an Enterprise SEO Audit Original
An enterprise SEO audit looks at large enterprise websites to find issues and opportunities that will improve rankings and visibility on search engines. The basics are the same as any other SEO audit. Yet, an audit like this is an entirely different beast because of all the complications that come from large sites and large companies such as: All the different systems. All the different teams working to shape the audit. All the things you might need to look at.
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