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.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

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.

If you have questions, ask me on LinkedIn or X.

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