Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied)

Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Both correlated more strongly with AI visibility than anything else, beating even “Branded web mentions”, which originally topped the list.

To clarify, “YouTube mentions” refer to any time a brand name crops up in a YouTube video title, transcript, or description—and “YouTube mention impressions” are those mentions weighted by the number of views each video received—data you can see in our YouTube index in Brand Radar.

When brands are mentioned more on YouTube, they are more likely to show up across all three AI surfaces.

Both AI Mode and AI Overviews are owned by Google—the same parent company as YouTube—and cite YouTube more than any other domain.

It’s not hard to see why YouTube mentions might carry extra weight on these platforms.

But ChatGPT—owned by OpenAI—showed almost identical correlations, and YouTube is its sixth most-cited domain.

In other words, this isn’t just a “Google” thing.

The relationship between “YouTube mentions” and AI visibility holds up, regardless of AI platform.

And YouTube doesn’t just make up AI assistant output—it’s also part of the training data.

Both Google and OpenAI have trained their models on YouTube transcripts.

In fact, The New York Times reported that OpenAI’s GPT-4 model was trained on over a million hours of YouTube transcriptions, treating them as a massive natural language dataset.

When you realize YouTube data is so heavily baked into both the input and output of AI assistants, those YouTube correlations become less surprising and more inevitable.

Another interesting finding: the volume of “YouTube mentions” seems to matter ever-so-slightly more than the reach.

Sidenote.

It’s important to note that the “Branded web mentions” we studied also included mentions from youtube.com—but only when the brand appeared in the video title—not in the transcript.

Brands don’t appear to be at a huge disadvantage if they’re mentioned in low-view videos, so long as they’re mentioned widely.

Further reading

programmatic content to drive up AI visibility.

But, going by the correlation data, this doesn’t seem to be the best course of action.

In the words of our Director of Content, Ryan Law, “It’s not just a content creation arms race.”

The same goes for link building—it isn’t enough to build tons of links for volume’s sake.

What matters most is getting mentioned across a broad scope of sites.

Further reading

own methods of prioritization, it doesn’t have the same advanced ranking systems baked in, which might explain why it doesn’t correlate as closely with the “classic” factors we’ve studied.

For a brand with modest search volume, backlinks, and web mentions, ChatGPT may be the best entry point into AI visibility, since it appears to be less heavily gated by traditional SEO authority metrics.

AI Overviews value DR more than any other assistant 

Aside from “YouTube mentions”, “domain rating” is one of the only factors where AI Overviews show stronger correlations.

That said, the difference is modest, and DR is a mid-tier correlating factor—much weaker than branded signals like “branded web mentions” and “branded anchors”.

AI Overviews deliver factual, one-shot answers to informational queries—unlike AI Mode and ChatGPT, which handle conversational back-and-forth.

Having just one chance to answer correctly with limited context may explain why they favor high-DR sources slightly more.

Further reading

ChatGPT mentions align with strong advertising presence 

Of all three AI systems studied, ChatGPT brand mentions correlate closest with ad metrics.

At first glance, this is fairly surprising—you’d think Google-owned properties would show closer correlations to their own ad data.

This doesn’t mean ChatGPT directly rewards ad spend, but that brands that advertise heavily tend to dominate the kind of content that ChatGPT draws on.

The big brands always come out on top 

Despite their different selection philosophies, the same brands generally appear across all AI assistants.

AI assistant pair	Correlation between brand mentions in AI responses
AI Overviews & AI Mode	0.821
AI Overviews & ChatGPT	0.749
AI Mode & ChatGPT	0.769

AI Mode might weigh branded anchors heavily and AI Overviews might care more about DR. But at the end of the day, they’re still mostly mentioning Nike, Apple, and Amazon.

The same big players tend to dominate, just through different paths.

What this means for smaller brands

There’s a clear hierarchy: YouTube presence and brand mentions matter most, followed by branded anchors, and search volume. Traditional SEO metrics like backlinks and domain authority seem to matter less.

If you can’t compete on brand recognition yet, focus on:

• Building YouTube presence (the strongest signal across all platforms)
• Earning genuine mentions in articles and guides
• Targeting ChatGPT, which shows the weakest correlation with established brand authority metrics

The platforms have different thresholds—ChatGPT seems to be the most accessible entry point, while AI Mode looks like the hardest to crack without established brand recognition.

Wrapping up

Across all three AI platforms, “YouTube mentions” correlate more strongly with AI visibility than any other factor we tested. If people are producing and watching videos about your brand, AI platforms likely take that as a strong signal you’re worth talking about.

And beyond YouTube, brand recognition still matters. Getting discussed across the web, in articles, guides, forums, and publications, is a strong predictor of AI visibility—especially in AI Mode. If you don’t yet have that kind of footprint, ChatGPT may be a route in, since it seems to rely less on traditional authority signals.

But there are some things that categorically won’t help, like chasing low quality links and churning out content for content’s sake.

The data shows a few unequivocal patterns: brands with strong YouTube presence, widespread mentions, and branded anchors are the ones appearing in AI responses.

Whether these factors directly influence which brands AI systems mention, or whether they’re simply markers of existing brand strength, they still give us something useful and concrete to work toward.