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Vendor reportAhrefs, 11 Aug 2025

AI Overview citations pull from Google's top 10 pages 76% of the time

Citation & visibility tracking

Ranking position of AI Overview citations in Google SERPs

  • Rank in top 1076.1%
  • Don't rank in top 10014.4%
  • Rank 11-1009.5%
Ranking position of AI Overview citations in Google SERPs
Ranking position of the cited pageShare of AI Overview citations (%)
Rank in top 1076.1%
Don't rank in top 10014.4%
Rank 11-1009.5%
Reader Note:
Not a finding of this study: the figure comes from earlier Ahrefs research referenced in the piece, which also reported a moderate positive correlation between Google rankings and AI Overview citations. It is the sharpest contrast in the article - AI Overviews follow the SERP, AI assistants do not.
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

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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.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

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Citation & visibility trackingTrend

Only about 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, while just over half are somewhere in the top 100.

Vendor report

BrightEdge, 12 Feb 2026

Only about 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, while just over half are somewhere in the top 100.

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