It pays to know how AI is changing search. 32% of Nasdaq companies see a strong correlation between their search visibility and stock prices. (Source) If traffic from search goes up, so do their stock prices. But recently, many companies saw major traffic (and revenue) declines thanks to changes in AI search. This post is…
Given OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft, many expect that ChatGPT’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process would use Bing. However, over the past months, some SEOs discovered that ChatGPT may have secretly pivoted to using Google instead. These were all one-off experiments. So, I wondered if it was possible for us to find out the ‘truth’ using data…
In a dataset of 15,000 prompts, we found that—on average—only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 results for the same prompt. Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. We 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…
Ever since AI Overviews began decimating clicks in organic search, I’ve had two questions on my mind: “What kind of AI Overview keywords still drive clicks?”, and “Is there a way to engineer more clicks from zero-click search?” I asked our ace data scientist, Xibeijia, if she could help me build a profile of “AI…
We analyzed 1,000,000 SERPs to see how the presence of different SERP features has changed since the start of the year. AI Overviews appeared from nowhere in August 2024, and now appear on over a quarter of the keywords in this sample (and they’re much more prevalent for informational keywords). Functionally, AI Overviews seem to overlap…
If you rank well in traditional search results, does that mean you’ll get cited in AI Overviews? We decided to find out. SEO still matters. Higher rankings improve your chances of AI Overview citations. And if you can rank high and get cited, you’re more likely to be featured prominently in the AI Overview. However, our…
How much do traditional and AI search results overlap? AI models draw on search engine indexes to enrich their static training data in a process known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), so some crossover between AI and search results is to be expected. But how much does your visibility in search align with your presence…
Get the week’s best marketing content AI Overviews aren’t always in the first position in the SERPs. For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position. See where AI Overviews appear outside of position 1 You can use the SERP features filter along with the Position filter to find some of the AI Overviews outside…
I set up some tests over a month ago to see if Google would rank content generated by Google AI Mode in the organic search results. Spoiler: it did not rank. Google believes AI Mode content is good enough to show to users in what will likely be the default search mode in the future. But…
AI Overviews are AI-generated content, which means they can contain hallucinations. Google uses “grounding” to improve their accuracy, but according to our research, AI Overviews are more likely to cite AI-generated content than human-written content. Here’s what we found: Keywords Explorer and extracted the top three cited links. 1.9 million URLs in total, of which we…
Article Performance Data from Ahrefs Linking websites The number of websites linking to this post. Get the week’s best marketing content 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…
