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An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)

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.

As ever, I’d like to say a huge thanks to our awesome data scientist Xibeijia Guan for pulling the data together for this study.

Let’s get into it.

Spearman correlation coefficient to analyze the data in this study–larger positive values reflect stronger positive correlations.

Factors that correlate with brand appearance in AI overviews. Branded web mentions (0.664), Branded anchors (0.527), Branded search volume (0.392), DR (0.326), # of ref domains (0.295), Branded traffic (0.274), Number of backlinks (0.218), Ad traffic (0.216), Ad cost (0.215), URL rating (0.18), Number of site pages (0.17)

  • Brand web mentions show the strongest correlation (0.664) with AI Overview brand visibility.
  • Web mentions (0.664) correlate much more strongly than backlinks (0.218).
  • The top 3 correlations are all off-site factors: brand web mentions (0.664), brand anchors (0.527), and brand search volume (0.392).
  • Paid factors like branded ad traffic (0.216) and branded ad cost (0.215) show weak positive correlations with AI mentions.
  • Brands earning the most web mentions earn up to 10X more mentions in AI Overviews vs. the next closest quartile.
  • 26% of brands have zero mentions in AI Overviews.

While the data shows statistical relationships, I should emphasize that correlation ≠ causation.

All the factors we studied revealed moderate to very weak correlations on the Spearman scale, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be overlooked.

These signals, and tons of others, all combine to influence your brand’s visibility in AI search.

Ahrefs Site Explorer via Ahrefs API.

The “keyword” factors included:

  • Branded web mentions (mentions of the brand name anywhere across the web)
  • Branded anchors (mentions of the brand name in hyperlinked text)
  • Branded search volume (monthly search volume attached to the brand name)

All “keyword” factors corresponded to the domain’s #1 ranking keyword.

We filtered for domains with DR > 40 and took their highest volume keyword with a monthly search volume of at least 800.

Though not a perfect calculus, it worked pretty well in helping us find legitimate brands.

Following that, we analyzed millions of AI Overview responses to find mentions of those brands, using Ahrefs Brand Radar

Roughly 26% had zero mentions–we studied the remaining ~74%.

Kevin Indig found in his recent AI visibility research:

Brand search volume is the biggest predictor for visibility in ChatGPT… The number of AI Chatbot mentions and brand search volume have a correlation of .334 – pretty good in this field.

Kevin Indig

Our correlation of 0.392 for branded search volume closely supports Kevin’s findings—but we’ve uncovered even stronger signals.

Branded web mentions–linked or unliked–show the highest correlation with brand presence in AI Overviews.

As our Content Marketing Director, Ryan Law, noted in his article GEO, LLMO, AEO… It’s All Just SEO:

Unlinked mentions—text written about your brand on other websites—have very little impact on SEO, but a much bigger impact on GEO… LLMs derive their understanding of a brand’s authority from words on the page, from the prevalence of particular words, the co-occurrence of different terms and topics, and the context in which those words are used.

Ryan Law

Another major thing to note is that all three of these factors represent “keyword” factors in our study.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are predictive language models. They train on a huge corpus of web text.

It makes sense that the signals determining your brand’s visibility in the LLMs of AI Overviews are rooted in text and language.

From all of this data we can infer that your brand’s presence across the web—not just your own website—is what AI Overviews draw on when deciding whether to mention you.

Research from Seer Interactive confirms this pattern.

The Seer team studied keywords, backlinks, domain rank, and SERP features across Google and Bing, to understand their relationship with brand mentions in ChatGPT.

Seer Interactive research: Correlation of LLM mentions by SERP Factor: DR (0.25), Backlinks (0.10), Google KWs (0.65), Google Organic KWs (0.65), Google SERP features (0.41), Bing KWs (0.50), Bing Organic KWs (0.56), Bing SERP features (0.36)

As you can see, they also discovered weaker correlations in link metrics such as domain rank (0.25) and backlinks (0.10), and observed the strongest relationships between Google keywords when it came to ChatGPT brand visibility.

Google’s web ranking systems are integrated into AI Overviews–that’s how they’re able to curate information from the top web results.

Leaked internal documents suggest that Google’s web ranking systems also consider user interaction data, like traffic and user behavior signals.

Based on that, you could be forgiven for thinking that your site’s traffic plays an important role in your AI Overview visibility.

But it seems that AI Overviews are more likely to favor text-based signals like web mentions (0.064) and anchors (0.527), over user behavior signals like organic traffic (0.274).

feature ads in AI Overviews, but our latest research shows these features aren’t widely monetized yet. As Patrick Stox noted in his analysis:

What’s more interesting is that 71.67% of the searches with AIOs had no CPC data. This indicates a majority of the AIO searches weren’t monetized at all. It’s no wonder no one has seen ads in AIOs yet. They aren’t showing for the majority of the terms that make Google money.

Patrick Stox

Percentage of searches with AIOs and CPCs

The issue is that AI Overviews are click deterrents–they always seek to provide the answer in-SERP, giving users less incentive to click.

And ads that drive minimal clicks aren’t the most attractive prospect to advertisers.

This may be one reason we haven’t seen many ads in AI Overviews.

But that’s not stopping Google. They have just expanded search and shopping ads in AI Overviews.

I expect we’ll start to see stronger correlations between paid search factors and AI Overview brand presence with this development.

vicious circle of SEO, it’s a strong reminder that visibility breeds more visibility.

This is a winner-takes-all scenario. If your brand isn’t being discussed across the web already, it’s likely it won’t be included in AI Overview responses either.

Lily Ray and Mark Williams-Cook have revealed how easily AI Overview visibility can be manipulated ¹ ² ³ , exposing flaws in the current system.

Further reading

But the struggle for enduring AI visibility that remains after those shortcuts are removed still looks a lot like brand building—because that’s exactly what it is.

Ultimately, building and measuring your brand awareness is key to earning compounding visibility in AI search.

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