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Articles by Xibeijia Guan
AI Overviews Currently Appear for 83% of Branded Searches
By Ryan Law Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs October 2, 20265 min read Chris Long recently discovered that AI Overviews appeared for 93 of the 100 enterprise brand names he tested. That prompted us to investigate AI Overviews for branded searches on a larger scale.
AI Overviews Cut CTR by 23.1% in France
By Juliette Begue France Marketing Manager at Ahrefs September 16, 20266 min read On July 22, 2026, France became the latest major search market to get AI Overviews. Which means that, for once, we got to watch the before and after without having to guess. In most markets, AI Overviews crept in alongside algorithm updates and seasonal swings, and we all spent the following year arguing about how much they had really cost us.
Analysis: Reddit Appears in 83.9% of Google’s Discussions and Forums Results
By Glen Allsopp Head of Marketing Strategy & Research at Ahrefs August 27, 202611 min read Our recent analysis of 145M US Google search results found the 'Discussions and forums' feature present in 16.93M (11.7%) of them. The most prominent domain was Reddit.com, which showed up in 87.8% of SERPs (83.9% worldwide), with an average of 1.29 link appearances.
Google Doesn’t Punish AI Content; It Punishes Bad Content (331k Pages Studied)
I still have plenty of questions about how Google treats AI-generated content. On the one hand, Google says they don’t care whether AI is used for content creation, as long as the content isn’t designed “with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results.” Automation has long been used in publishing to create useful content. AI can assist with and generate useful content in exciting new ways.
We Tracked 1,885 Pages Adding Schema. AI Citations Barely Moved.
We kicked off this study by analyzing 6 million URLs, and found that schema markup is much more common on pages cited by AI than pages that aren’t. AI cited pages were almost three times more likely to have JSON-LD than non-cited pages. That’s a big gap, and the kind of stat that gets shared in LinkedIn carousels and conference slides as proof that schema is an AI visibility lever. But we weren’t satisfied with the data since it could easily have been correlation, not cause.
Why ChatGPT Cites One Page Over Another (Study of 1.4M Prompts)
We’ve all got used to the little numbered blue links in ChatGPT’s responses. They’re the citations that back up ChatGPT’s responses with external information. But, although ChatGPT crawls dozens of pages to answer a single query, according to our research, it only ends up citing ~50% of them. Why does one page get the credit while another, which the AI clearly retrieved, gets nothing?
Wikipedia vs Grokipedia: 5x the Pages, 70x the Citations, 1615x the Traffic
Wikipedia plays a cornerstone role in influencing online visibility. But what about Grokipedia, the new AI-generated wiki on the block? Is Grokipedia a serious competitor to Wikipedia, or just a doomed exercise in billionaire hubris? Does Grok bring new value to the table, or just rehash the same old content? Does Grokipedia influence AI search in a similar way to Wikipedia?
Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages
How frequently do pages ranking in the SERPs get cited in AI Overviews? We analyzed 1.9M citations last year in an attempt to answer that question. But, as with everything AI-related, a lot has changed since then. For instance, as of January 2026, AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 3 to better answer searchers’ long-tail questions—having previously relied on earlier Gemini models, including 2.5 variants.
Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
Back in April 2025, we found that AI Overviews reduced clicks to top-ranking content by 34.5%, despite Google’s statements to the contrary. Since then, AI Overviews have rolled out to more countries and more languages, and many websites have continued to see the clicks from organic search decline month-over-month. Today, it seems likely that the impact of AI Overviews has worsened.
ChatGPT Gets Googled More Than YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok
I was mucking around on Google Trends the other week when I discovered something curious: ChatGPT’s global search interest overtook top platforms earlier this year, and nobody noticed. That felt impossible. For instance, YouTube has been the internet’s default video platform for nearly two decades. It’s frequently dubbed the second-largest search engine. So I asked Xibeijia, Ahrefs’ superstar data scientist, to pull our data and double-check.
Are AI Mode and AI Overviews Just Different Versions of the Same Answer? (730K Responses Studied)
Google’s AI Mode generates responses that are 4x longer than AI Overviews (on average). When we first noticed this, the natural assumption was that AI Mode simply expands on the same information, taking AI Overview’s concise answer and adding more detail from the same sources. But after analyzing 730,000 response pairs, we found something unexpected: AI Mode and AI Overviews reach very similar conclusions (86% semantic similarity) while citing different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied)
Expanding on one of our most popular AI Overview studies, we’ve analyzed 75,000 brands to see which search factors are most likely to influence brand mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. Let’s get into it. YouTube mentions show the strongest correlation with AI visibility (~0.737), outperforming every other factor across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. YouTube mentions correlate slightly more strongly than YouTube mention impressions across all platforms (~0.737 vs ~0.717).
Short vs. Long Content in AI Overviews: The Data Says Both Work
Lately, I’ve seen some particularly bad advice floating around on how long content should be to show up in AI search. For instance, this study of only 20 brands (narrow sample size) is proclaiming that content needs 10,000+ words to be cited by AI. I’ve also seen others insist very short content (250–500 words) is the future for visibility in AI, arguing that AI models have limited context windows and prefer concise answers (). In reality, it’s a chicken-or-egg situation.
AI Overviews Change Every 2 Days (But Never Change Their Mind)
Just how stable are AI Overviews? If you manage to get your brand mentioned or cited in them, can you take the rest of the month off? Or do you have to fight for ongoing visibility? To find the answers, our data scientist, Xibeijia Guan, analyzed over 43,000 keywords—each with at least 16 recorded AI Overviews—over the course of a month. She extracted this data from Brand Radar, our new AI visibility tool that tracks hundreds of millions of prompts and queries across seven different AI assistants.
What Triggers AI Overviews? 86 Factors and 146 Million SERPs Analyzed
What triggers an AI Overview? What types of queries are most likely to generate an AIO, and which are relatively safe? Can we predict where AIOs will appear, and even target SERPs without them? To answer these questions, we analyzed our database of 146 million SERPs and explored how often AI Overviews appeared for 86 different keyword traits, from YMYL to CPC to query length. Across our data set, AI Overviews appear for 21% of keywords.
96.98% of Clicks Happen in the Top 10 Search Results
How many clicks and impressions come from rankings beyond Google’s first page? To find out, we analysed 458 billion clicks and 17 trillion impressions from Google Search Console. Our findings are a good reminder: page one is where the overwhelming majority of clicks and impressions happen. 96.98% of desktop clicks happen in the top 10 In August 2025, 96.98% of desktop clicks in the US happened within the top 10 results.
New Study: How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied)
AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can hallucinate URLs and direct visitors to non-existent pages on your website. But how often does it happen? To find out, we looked at the http status of 16 million unique URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral. We found that AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87x more often than Google Search.
Is ChatGPT Really Powered by Google? 118,931 Fan-Out Queries Analyzed
Given OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft, many expect that ChatGPT’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process would use Bing. However, over the past months, some SEOs discovered that ChatGPT may have secretly pivoted to using Google instead. These were all one-off experiments. So, I wondered if it was possible for us to find out the ‘truth’ using data instead. Here’s what we found. I asked our data scientist Xibeijia Guan for help with this.
Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 for the Original Prompt
In a dataset of 15,000 prompts, we found that—on average—only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 results for the same prompt. Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. We analyzed four AI assistants—ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity—to measure how often the URLs they cite or reference overlap with what Google or Bing ranks for the same query.
Do AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresh” Content? (17 Million Citations Analyzed)
Do AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity prefer to cite “fresh” content? We analyzed 17 million citations across 7 AI search platforms to find out. As we clamor to optimize for AI search visibility, I’ve seen suggestions that we should update pages more frequently to boost their chance of being cited.
What We Learned From Studying Our Own "AI Proof" Keywords
Ever since AI Overviews began decimating clicks in organic search, I’ve had two questions on my mind: “What kind of AI Overview keywords still drive clicks?”, and “Is there a way to engineer more clicks from zero-click search?” I asked our ace data scientist, Xibeijia, if she could help me build a profile of “AI proof keywords”. By “AI proof keywords” I mean queries that keep (or increase) their clicks, even when AI Overviews are present in the SERP.
Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era
We analyzed 1,000,000 SERPs to see how the presence of different SERP features has changed since the start of the year. AI Overviews appeared from nowhere in August 2024, and now appear on over a quarter of the keywords in this sample (and they’re much more prevalent for informational keywords). Functionally, AI Overviews seem to overlap with existing SERP features, especially Featured snippets.
Does Ranking Higher on Google Mean You'll Get Cited in AI Overviews?
If you rank well in traditional search results, does that mean you’ll get cited in AI Overviews? We decided to find out. We pulled one million keywords that triggered AI Overviews and extracted the top three links cited within those AIOs: a total of 1.9 million citation links in our database.
76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages
How much do traditional and AI search results overlap? AI models draw on search engine indexes to enrich their static training data in a process known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), so some crossover between AI and search results is to be expected. But how much does your visibility in search align with your presence in AI? With the help of Xibeijia Guan, I was able to study 1.9M citations from 1M AI Overviews to find out—analyzing the top 3 most visible citations in each response.
AI Overviews Cite AI-Generated Content More Than Human Writing
AI Overviews are AI-generated content, which means they can contain hallucinations. Google uses “grounding” to improve their accuracy, but according to our research, AI Overviews are more likely to cite AI-generated content than human-written content. Here’s what we found: We took one million SERPs showing AI Overviews from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and extracted the top three cited links. 1.9 million URLs in total, of which we had 500,000 in our database.
AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed)
In 2023, Google published a blog post stating that they’re not against AI content: If you think about it, there is no clearer signal than the fact that Google has rapidly rolled out AI Overviews (and now AI mode), both of which are basically AI-generated content. Yet there are still many SEOs and digital marketers who think that Google seeks to actively punish AI content.
AI Traffic Has Increased 9.7x in the Past Year
Ahrefs’ AI traffic continues to grow, month-over-month. Though still <1% of total traffic, it’s now our highest converting channel at 10%+ CVR (going by our new custom event tracking in Web Analytics). I wanted to see if other sites were experiencing any AI traffic growth–especially now that zero-click search has taken hold. We decided to update the findings of our March AI traffic research while we were at it.
Almost Half of Google Searches Are Branded. Here’s Why That Matters
When most marketers think about SEO, they jump straight to keywords like “best running shoes” or “how to do [whatever]”. Non-branded, high-intent, top-of-funnel stuff. But our latest study might surprise you: Nearly half of all Google searches (45.7%) are branded searches—meaning people are actively seeking out specific companies and products they already know. Yep, nearly half of what people type into Google includes a brand name or a product name.
An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)
With Google’s AI mode developments, we’re heading toward a future where search results could eventually roll up into one big AI Overview. Soon it won’t be a case of “Should I, or shouldn’t I optimize for AI Overviews?” If you want any chance of search visibility, you’ll need to understand how to rank in Google’s AI results. With this new reality in mind, we’ve analyzed 75,000 brands to see which search factors are most likely to influence brand mentions in AI Overviews.
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.
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.
74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages)
We analyzed 900,000 newly created web pages in April 2025 and found that 74.2% of them contained AI-generated content. At Ahrefs, our machine learning team has built an AI content detector (codenamed bot_or_not). We’re about to release the AI content detector for Ahrefs customers to use, so we decided to put it through its paces with a question we’ve been dying to answer: What percentage of new content is AI-generated? Sidenote.
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.
Top 40 Fastest-Growing Cybersecurity Companies
The cybersecurity industry is growing fast, with both new and established players competing for attention. Many new AI-led security innovations are also sweeping the market. Using Ahrefs’ website growth data, we’ve found the 40 fastest-growing cybersecurity companies of 2025 based on estimated year-over-year (YoY) organic traffic growth. We analyzed 4,300+ global cybersecurity companies and filtered for those with at least 1,000 monthly organic visits in 2025.
Top 50 Fastest-Growing EdTech Companies
The EdTech industry is expanding rapidly, with a global market projected to reach $354.71 billion this year. From AI tutors to classroom management platforms, both new startups and established players are racing to capture attention and market share. Using Ahrefs’ website data, we’ve found the top 50 fastest-growing EdTech companies of 2025, ranked by estimated year-over-year organic traffic growth.
AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%
Google says AI Overviews increase clicks. Cold, hard logic disagrees, and so does our research. We analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview. Thanks to our data scientist, Xibeijia Guan, for pulling the data for this analysis.
AI Makes Up 0.1% of Traffic, but Clicks Aren’t Everything
While AI traffic is growing as a referral source, Google still dominates by a factor of 345x, and Reddit out-refers all three major AIs combined. As it stands AI traffic isn’t making much of a dent, so is it worth pursuing? Here’s what we know so far… Sidenote. Thanks to our data scientist Xibeijia Guan for aggregating all of the data behind this research.
Do Higher Content Scores Mean Higher Google Rankings? We Studied It (So You Don’t Have To)
At Ahrefs, we make a content optimization tool called AI Content Helper. And like most content optimization tools, we score how well your articles are optimized. Built within these scores is an implicit assumption that the higher your score, the higher you’ll likely rank on Google. But is that actually true? To find out, I studied the correlation between rankings and content scores from five content optimization tools: Surfer, Frase, NeuronWriter, Clearscope, and our own AI Content Helper.
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