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…
In 2023, Google published a blog post stating that they’re not against AI content: If you think about it, there is no clearer signal than the fact that Google has rapidly rolled out AI Overviews (and now AI mode), both of which are basically AI-generated content. Yet there are still many SEOs and digital marketers…
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 more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining mentions as the number of web pages that mention an entity at least once. I looked at the top…
Get the week’s best marketing content Does being seen more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining “being seen” or web visibility as the estimated total monthly organic search traffic to all pages that mention the entity. These are prominent pages on the web, with a lot of visibility. Having…
Though still <1% of total traffic, it’s now our highest converting channel at 10%+ CVR (going by our new custom event tracking in Web Analytics). I wanted to see if other sites were experiencing any AI traffic growth–especially now that zero-click search has taken hold. We decided to update the findings of our March AI traffic…
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…
AI is all anyone can talk about right now–and for good reason. It’s on track to drive change at a scale we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. But in a space moving this fast, most stats you find are already out of date. So we did the digging for you. Here are 80+ current, credible,…
Google is forever telling us that AI search is better quality… When they [users] get to a decision to click out, it’s a more highly qualified click… What we hope to see over time—and we don’t have any data to share on this—is more time spent on site, which is what we see organically in…
I don’t think this result will come as a surprise to anyone. Websites that get more traffic in traditional organic search also get mentioned more in AI Search. Popular sites are popular, even if the search system changes. I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT,…
When most marketers think about SEO, they jump straight to keywords like “best running shoes” or “how to do [whatever]”. Non-branded, high-intent, top-of-funnel stuff. But our latest study might surprise you: Nearly half of all Google searches (45.7%) are branded searches—meaning people are actively seeking out specific companies and products they already know. Yep, nearly…
With Google’s AI mode developments, we’re heading toward a future where search results could eventually roll up into one big AI Overview. Soon it won’t be a case of “Should I, or shouldn’t I optimize for AI Overviews?” If you want any chance of search visibility, you’ll need to understand how to rank in Google’s…
