Area-Stage Hyperlink Metrics Might Not Be Good Predictors of AI Search Mentions

Going into this research, I suspected that domain-level hyperlink metrics wouldn’t be a very good predictor for mentions. I used to be anticipating Google AI Overviews to indicate extra of a correlation since they could use a few of the conventional search indicators, whereas the opposite methods might not. For conventional search, normally the page-level metrics are extra predictive of rankings than domain-level ones.

I regarded on the prime 50 web sites talked about in Ahrefs Model Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. That is throughout ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.

I in contrast the web site mentions to their Ahrefs Rank (AR) in Ahrefs. Ahrefs Rank (AR) ranks all of the web sites in our database so as, by the scale and high quality of their adopted referring domains.

Sidenote.

Model Radar isn’t simply one other LLM visibility monitor, we monitor a considerable amount of queries throughout all of those methods and you’ll question for any product, service, or model and evaluate vs rivals. It’s extra like Website Explorer than it’s Rank Tracker. Plus now we have the net visibility index so that you could see the way you’re talked about on-line and the search demand index to see how widespread you’re in searches.

Right here’s what Model Radar appears to be like like.

Let’s dig in.

Perplexity exhibits a reasonable correlation between the mentions of its most-cited domains and their Ahrefs Rank, Google AI Overviews a really weak correlation, and ChatGPT no correlation. I used to be anticipating Google to have a stronger relationship than Perplexity, so the outcomes stunned me.

This correlation would seemingly change with a bigger dataset exterior of simply the highest 50. The highest 50 are all extraordinarily well-linked and cited web sites.

I’ll give the standard correlation doesn’t equal causation disclaimer.

Listed below are the Spearman rank correlations for point out share vs. Ahrefs Rank throughout the highest 50 domains in every system:

AI Assistant	Spearman Rho	P-Worth	Correlation
Google AI Overviews	-0.12	0.47	Very weak
ChatGPT	0.01	0.95	No relationship
Perplexity	-0.34	0.095	Weak

Google AI Overviews over-index on UGC websites like YouTube, Reddit, and Quora, in addition to encyclopedic content material like Wikipedia. We’ve seen this in a number of different research already.

These websites get additional weight in mentions than their hyperlink profile predicts.

Google AI Overviews underweights on social media websites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Fb. One other sample we’ve seen in different research.

We additionally see an identical story with ChatGPT, the place they’re chubby on issues like Wikipedia and information websites like Reuters, precisely like we noticed earlier than.