Mateusz Makosiewicz Marketing researcher and educator at Ahrefs. Mateusz has over 15 years of experience in marketing gained in agencies, SaaS and hardware businesses. When not writing, he's composing music or enjoying long walks.Article PerformanceData from AhrefsThe number of websites linking to this post.
This post's estimated monthly organic search traffic.
Get the week's best marketing content Email Subscription Subscribe Leave this field empty if you're human: Contents AI assistants mention brands constantly but they rarely include links. When I tracked brand mentions for Ahrefs across six AI platforms, I found they linked to Ahrefs as rarely as 10% of the time for AI Overviews, and as often as 50% of the time for Perplexity.But here’s what matters more: in our case, the mentions that do include links appear on high-volume queries. This means your actual visibility—measured in impressions rather than raw citation counts—can be far higher than your link percentage suggests.
In this analysis, I’ll show you how tracking mentions alone paints an incomplete picture, why search volume is your best proxy for AI prompt popularity, and how to measure your own brand’s AI citation rate.
ContentsA quick note on terminologyThroughout this article, I’ll use three terms:
The source of the data is Ahrefs Brand Radar.
AI assistants mentioned our brand far more often than they linked to us.
Out of more than 31,000 brand mentions pulled from a database of 150 million prompts using Brand Radar, I found that AI Overviews were the stingiest—they included a link only 10.7% of the time. Perplexity, on the other hand, was the most generous, linking 51.6% of the time. The other platforms fell somewhere in between.
This means on these AI assistants, our brand got mentioned without a link 50-90% of the time; about 28% of the time on average.
Here’s how to check that for your brand with Brand Radar:
I wanted to see how often people actually see brand mentions that link to our site (i.e. their impressions) compared to mentions that don’t. Once I factored in Google search volume, the share of mentions with links jumped much higher.
So even though most AI mentions don’t include a link, the ones that do tend to show up on higher-traffic queries, meaning they’re seen by more people.
Here’s how often linked mentions appeared, weighted by impressions:
In other words, you might get linked only 20% of the time, but because those links appear on high-volume queries, way more than 20% of people actually see your citations.
To check this for your own brand, follow the same steps described above, just switch from the Mentions tab to the Impressions tab.
At Ahrefs, we’ve always focused on going after high-volume keywords in our SEO strategy. Because of that, we can’t say for sure whether AI platforms naturally cite sources more often on popular queries.
What we can say is that our focus on high-traffic topics in our SEO strategy seems to carry over into AI visibility. Our brand tends to get cited on the more popular keywords—the same keywords we’ve been prioritizing in our SEO work.
That’s why mentions with links end up being seen by more people, even though there are more overall mentions without citations.
Every AI platform has its own way of citing sources, and that’s something we can’t fully control. But we can improve AI visibility by using SEO to optimize for keywords popular in traditional Google Search.
Think of search volume as a proxy for prompt popularity. For example, if 10,000 people search “best SEO tools” on Google each month, thousands of others are probably asking AI assistants similar questions, even if they phrase them differently. By focusing on high-volume keywords, you’re really aligning with the most common AI prompts.
And because AI assistants don’t rely on a single exact query, this matters even more. When someone asks a question, the AI often runs several related “fan-out queries” in the background—basically different versions or breakdowns of the original prompt—to gather more context.
You can’t predict those exact variations, but if you cover a topic thoroughly, you’re more likely to be cited across all of them.
Sure, AI might only mention or link to your site 20–30% of the time. But when you’re showing up for high-traffic topics, those small percentages happen across thousands of queries, creating a big visibility boost.
Got questions or comments? Find me on LinkedIn.
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Article by Mateusz Makosiewicz Marketing researcher and educator at Ahrefs. Mateusz has over 15 years of experience in marketing gained in agencies, SaaS and hardware businesses. When not writing, he's composing music or enjoying long walks.Keep Learning AI Content Marketing 101: Strategies from Someone Who Lives It Maybe AI will replace everyone's jobs someday. But right now, the real risk is not using it and falling behind everyone who is. What We Actually Know About Optimizing for LLM Search The latest wave of experts claim to know the “secret” to AI visibility, but we’re all still figuring it out. Here's what know so far, based on ongoing research and experimentation. Republishing Content for SEO & AI: How to Update Posts (Not Just Change Dates) Republishing content can boost AI visibility, give you a new chance to rank & turn visitors into repeat readers. Here's how to do it right. 80+ Up-to-Date AI Statistics for 2025 (No Stale Sources) Most AI statistics are already out of date. So we did the digging for you. Here are 80+ current, credible, and 2025-centered AI statistics. Search English EnglishDeutschEspañolFrançaisItalianoPortuguês中文日本語 © 2025 Ahrefs Pte Ltd.Pick a topic Marketing AI Search SEO Data & Studies Product Ahrefs Tools Core Tools Free Tools
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