Does Being Mentioned on Highly Linked Pages Influence AI Mentions?

Does being mentioned on highly cited web pages lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining highly cited web pages as those with more Referring Domains (RD).

These are prominent pages on the web and those that other websites have deemed worthy of linking to. Having your brand present on these pages means you likely have more credibility, that you’re a known brand.

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.

Let’s dig in.

Spearman rank correlations for mentions on highly cited web pages versus AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:

AI Assistant	Spearman ρ	Correlation
Google AI Overviews	0.70	Strong
ChatGPT	0.12	Very weak
Perplexity	0.40	Moderate

Final thoughts

It will be interesting to see how this changes when we run this for a larger number of websites.

Make sure you check out Brand Radar. 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.