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Original study
Publisher
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:
Methodology
Geography
Data period
PublishedCitation & visibility trackingTrend
Only 12% of links cited by AI assistants show up in Google's top 10 search results for the same promptOnly 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google’s Top 10 for the Original Prompt
Original study- Publisher
- Ahrefs
- Evidence:
- Observed behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate
- 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.
- Methodology
- Disclosed
- Geography
- Global
- Data period
- 01.07.2025 – 31.07.2025
- Published
- 11 Aug 2025
Summary:
This research piece is about how often links cited by AI assistants match the pages that rank in regular search results. It looks at whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity point people to the same URLs that Google and Bing rank for the same question.
It was published by Ahrefs, an SEO software company.
Ahrefs sells search marketing tools, including tools for tracking rankings, keywords, and brand mentions. The main goal was to measure how much overlap there is between AI citations and search rankings, and to compare the assistants with each other.
Ahrefs says its data scientist used Ahrefs Brand Radar to run 15,000 long-tail queries in Google and Bing, then asked those same questions to the four AI assistants.
They pulled out the visible citations from the AI answers and checked whether those URLs appeared in the search results, especially in the top 10 and top 100.
This is an observational study based on URLs returned by search engines and AI systems, not a controlled experiment.
The main finding is that overlap was low. On average, only 12% of AI-cited URLs appeared in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt, and about 10% appeared in Bing’s top 10.
Ahrefs also says about 80% of AI citations did not rank anywhere in Google for the original query.
Cards from this research
TrendCitation & visibility trackingIdea
IdeaAI Overview citations pull from Google's top 10 pages 76% of the time
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About 80% of AI assistant citations do not rank anywhere in Google for the original queryOptimisation methodsIdea
Optimizing for multiple long-tail query variations helps increase chances of being cited by AI assistantsCitation & visibility trackingTrend
Copilot has the highest overlap with Bing's top 10 among AI assistants
Citation & visibility trackingTrend
Perplexity is the only AI assistant where nearly 1 in 3 citations point to Google's top 10 search resultsCitation & visibility trackingIdea
AI assistants choose citations differently from Google or Bing, often picking pages from related queries rather than the exact same promptCitation & visibility trackingTrend
The overall average overlap between AI assistant citations and Google/Bing top 10 search results is 11%