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. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.
I compared the website mentions to their Ahrefs Rank (AR) in Ahrefs. Ahrefs Rank (AR) ranks all the websites in our database in order, by the size and quality of their followed referring domains.
Sidenote.
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.
Here’s what Brand Radar looks like.
Let’s dig in.
Spearman rank correlations for mention share vs. Ahrefs Rank across the top 50 domains in each system:
AI Assistant
Spearman Rho
P-Value
Correlation
Google AI Overviews
-0.12
0.47
Very weak
ChatGPT
0.01
0.95
No relationship
Perplexity
-0.34
0.095
Weak
higher correlations in Google AI Overviews compared to DR when we studied 75k sites than we saw in correlations to normal Google rankings across 1 million keywords, 0.326 vs 0.131.
We’ll run a bigger study beyond the top 50, as well as look at some more page level metrics for more insights.
We’ve rolled out a major update to two courses in our Decoupled Headless Drupal guide: Get Started with React and Drupal Together and API Authentication with JSON:API in Drupal. These updates (and a new tutorial!) bring our tutorials in line with current security best practices and modern React development tooling. Huge thanks to lead trainer,…
Ever had a brilliant product idea but felt stuck, unsure if anyone would actually buy it? You’re not alone. Many aspiring entrepreneurs believe that product research is a complex and expensive process reserved for big companies with huge budgets. The good news is that’s no longer true. Today, anyone with an internet connection can uncover…
Aristotle once said, ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But it’s the parts of a domain name we care about. Learn about them in our guide. Even if technology isn’t your jam, you probably know how to find a particular website: you type the company name into your browser, plus a…
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…
These are the 100 most asked questions on Google, along with their monthly search volumes. Keywords Explorer Enter a relevant keyword Go to the Matching terms report Toggle the Questions tab For example, if you search for “coffee”, you can see 142,000 questions which you could potentially create content for. Want to do keyword research for your site?…
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…