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.
The results reveal a surprising paradox in how Google’s AI operates—a constant state of change on the surface, but a deep, underlying stability.
Forbes and Fortune showed up consistently between October and November, but the third URL changed.
Initially, a Reddit comment about protein powders took second place, but a month later it was replaced by Fortune’s “best” list, and a new article from NBC on “protein shake safety” entered the third spot.
Here’s one more example for the query “renter’s insurance”—each AI Overview was captured just a week apart.
The first AI Overview returned three citations, but only two of those carried over to the second capture, where a further ten citations joined the list.
It’s clear that AI Overview visibility doesn’t follow the same consistency patterns as traditional search rankings.
Your brand can be cited today, and gone tomorrow.
Further reading
In fact, his hypothesis sparked this whole study…
But the findings disprove this.
Firstly, we’d expect to see far more stability across AI Overview content if some were being cached.
But, as we already know, consecutive AI Overviews showed different content 7 out of 10 times.
Secondly, Xibeijia measured the actual relationship between a keyword’s search volume and its AI Overview change rate, and found a Spearman correlation of -0.014.
A correlation this close to zero indicates there is likely no relationship between the two variables—hugely popular search queries are just as likely to have their AI Overview text change as very niche ones.
So, it’s unlikely Google caches popular AI Overviews—at least based on our data.
Wrapping up
AI Overviews are both dynamic and stable at the same time.
The surface details, like the exact wording, URLs cited, and entities mentioned all switch constantly—but the underlying meaning and the core topics stay the same.
This changes how we can think about AI-generated search results.
They’re not static like traditional search results, but they’re not random either.
While you should expect your brand mentions and citations in AI Overviews to be volatile, there’s still a way to show up consistently.
Rather than focusing on individual prompts or queries, you need to become an authority on the themes associated with your core topics.
You can understand which themes AI ties to your brand using Ahrefs Brand Radar.
Just drop in your brand, and head to the “Topics” report. This will show you which themes individual AI responses ladder up to.
For example, Ahrefs is most closely linked to the topics of “SEO tools” and “SEO software” in AI Overview responses.
Tracking AI visibility over a volume of answers will also help you see past the variance of AI responses.
By focusing on aggregated visibility and AI Share of Voice, you can:
- See if AI consistently ties you to a category—not just if you appeared once.
- Track trends over time—not just snapshots.
- Learn how your brand is positioned against competitors—not just mentioned.
Winning the topic, not the query, is the best way to stay visible—even when AI answers are changing daily.
Similar Posts
How to Build an SEO Topical Map (With Template)
An SEO topical map is the roadmap for your website’s content strategy. Its core function is to organize your website’s content in a clear hierarchy of topics and sub-topics. It helps you: Make it easier for users to navigate your website Signal to search engines that your content comprehensively covers a topic Become an authority in a…
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. To test the theory, we used…
I Wouldn’t Hire a Content Engineer, and You Shouldn’t Either
We’re all trying to figure out the future of content marketing. Thanks to generative AI, every part of our discipline is in flux: the tactics and strategies that yield great results, the tools and processes we use to achieve them, even the unit economics that justify it. One suggestion put forward by Josh Spilker at…
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…
Steal 21+ of Our Best SEO & Content Marketing Templates
It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out in SEO, or you’re decades-deep—these battle-tested content marketing templates will give you a headstart on your next project. I’ve been in marketing for coming up to ten years now (*internal scream at the passing of time*) and, while I like to think I have a bit of…
67% of ChatGPT’s Top 1,000 Citations Are Off-Limits to Marketers (+ More Findings)
I analyzed the top 1,000 pages ChatGPT cited in September 2025 using Ahrefs Brand Radar, to understand what types of content AI is referencing right now. You can repeat this analysis yourself pretty easily. Just do an open database search in Brand Radar, head to the “Cited pages” report for your desired AI assistant, and export…
