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Vendor reportAhrefs, 11 Aug 2025

The overall average overlap between AI assistant citations and Google/Bing top 10 search results is 11%

Citation & visibility tracking

11%

The overall average overlap between AI assistant citations and Google/Bing top 10 search results

Reader Note:
The 11% spans two engines that differ: about 12% against Google's top 10 and about 10% against Bing's. One figure across both hides that gap, and it hides that on the Google side nearly half of the whole overlap comes from Perplexity alone.
Evidence:
Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:
Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:
15,000 long-tail queries run in Google and Bing, then the same questions asked of ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity; every visible cited URL was extracted and matched against search ranking positions, recorded as top 10 or top 100. Data collected in early July 2025, published 11 August 2025 — the article itself warns that results may have changed. The headline averages are unweighted means across five citation surfaces, not four assistants: ChatGPT is counted twice (in-text citations and bottom-of-response references), so it carries double weight, Perplexity carries single weight, and no surface is weighted by how many citations it actually produces. 12% is (28.6 + 8 + 6.1 + 8.6 + 8.2) / 5; the 11% Google-and-Bing figure divides the two engine totals by 10; the Bing 10% is (16.6 + 14 + 8.1 + 8.1 + 3.3) / 5. The 80% non-ranking figure is the author's own approximation, not a computed statistic.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Not for

  • Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
  • This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
  • This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

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