The team at Ahrefs conducted 14 studies, analyzing more than a billion data points to answer the biggest question on every marketer’s mind: how does promotion actually work when AI assistants generate half of the answers?
Top-X Lists Rule
“Best Top-X” articles are the most prominent type of pages cited by AI chatbots. They account for around 40% of all pages cited specifically by ChatGPT.
For example:
- Best CRM Systems
- Best Website Builders
- Best VPNs
- Best Email Marketing Services
The good old “Top 10 Best...” format has unexpectedly gained a second life in the age of AI.
You Cannot Influence Most Citations
This is perhaps the most interesting finding of the study.
67% of the top 1,000 most-cited pages in ChatGPT are outside marketers’ control.
The distribution looks like this:
- Wikipedia - 29.7%
- Website Homepages - 23.8%
- App Stores - 6.6%
Only 32.3% consists of content that can realistically be developed and promoted:
- articles;
- reviews;
- news;
- educational content;
- blog posts.
Google and ChatGPT Live in Different Worlds
Perhaps the most surprising fact.
Among the pages most frequently cited by ChatGPT, 28.3% have zero organic visibility in Google. In other words, a page may appear regularly in ChatGPT responses while not ranking in Google at all.
This is direct evidence that AI search is creating its own layer of content discovery that does not fully operate according to the rules of traditional SEO.
Being Discovered and Being Cited Are Not the Same Thing
According to Ahrefs, ChatGPT cites roughly half of the URLs it discovers.
The remaining pages are also processed by the model but are used only as internal context without being mentioned as sources.
As a result, there are now two separate objectives:
- Get into the document selection pool.
- Get into the final list of citations.
And the second objective turns out to be significantly more difficult.
Schema Markup Barely Works
Adding schema markup had no significant impact on citations in AI assistants.
Results:
- AI Overviews: −4.6%
- AI Mode: +2.4%
- ChatGPT: +2.2%
That is essentially a negligible effect.
If someone promises you “magical AI SEO markup” that will dramatically increase your website’s visibility in AI systems, it is worth treating such claims with extreme caution.
YouTube Turned Out to Be More Important Than Links
Mentions of a topic on YouTube showed the strongest correlation with brand visibility in AI systems - 0.737. This exceeded all traditional SEO metrics, including backlinks, page count, DR, and others. The effect was observed across both Google products and OpenAI systems.
If businesses used to say, “We need a blog,” a new question is increasingly emerging: “Do we need a YouTube channel?”
AI Overviews Are Killing Clicks
If the number-one position in Google was once considered a gold mine, the situation is changing rapidly.
According to Ahrefs, the presence of AI Overviews reduces the CTR of the first position by approximately 58%.
Traffic is gradually staying within the search engine itself, and users are increasingly getting answers without visiting a website.
AI Answers Favor Informational Queries
Nearly 99.9% of AI Overviews appear for informational queries.
That is when users are looking for:
- instructions;
- explanations;
- reviews;
- reference information.
For commercial queries, however, the situation remains much calmer for now.
In product-related searches, AI Overviews appear in only about 3.2% of cases.
As a result, sales, services, and local businesses still remain relatively comfortable for the time being.
AI Mode and AI Overviews Agree With Each Other but Cite Different Sources
For identical queries, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions in 86% of cases.
However, they rely on almost entirely different sets of sources.
In other words, two systems can provide virtually the same answer while drawing on completely different websites.
AI Results Change Every Two Days
Another reason why measuring AI visibility is becoming increasingly difficult: on average, AI Overviews are refreshed every 2.15 days.
Sources, wording, and citations are constantly being updated, even though the overall meaning of the answer usually remains unchanged.
This makes AI search significantly more dynamic than traditional search results.
SEO Is Not Dead, but the Rules of the Game Are Changing Rapidly
Visibility in AI systems increasingly depends not only on Google rankings but also on a brand’s overall digital presence:
- expert content;
- mentions on authoritative platforms;
- YouTube;
- brand awareness;
- the quality of information available about the company online.
In the past, it was enough to beat search engine algorithms. Now brands must simultaneously compete for the attention of users, search engines, and an entire new generation of AI assistants.
Promoting a business online has become even more difficult and expensive. Thanks, AI ☕️