Does being seen more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining “being seen” or web visibility as the estimated total monthly organic search traffic to all pages that mention the entity.
These are prominent pages on the web, with a lot of visibility. Having your brand present on these pages means you likely have more credibility, that you’re a known brand.
I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.
Let’s dig in.
I’ll give the usual correlation does not equal causation disclaimer.
I didn’t think this would be any kind of direct signal, but I was expecting fairly strong correlations here. Google AI Overviews shows a moderate, nearly strong correlation. Perplexity is a weak correlation but close to moderate. ChatGPT shows a weak correlation.
As we’ve seen in other studies, Google favors brands. Perplexity always seems to be more balanced. I think ChatGPT leans heavily on partnerships for top citation sources.
Here are the Spearman rank correlations for web visibility vs. AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:
| AI Assistant | Spearman ρ | Correlation |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 0.55 | Moderate |
| ChatGPT | 0.20 | Weak |
| Perplexity | 0.35 | Weak |
Final thoughts
It will be interesting to see how this changes when we run this for a larger number of websites.
Make sure you check out Brand Radar. Brand Radar isn’t just another LLM visibility monitor, we track a large amount of queries across all of these systems and you can query for any product, service, or brand and compare vs competitors. It’s more like Site Explorer than it is Rank Tracker.
Plus we have the web visibility index so that you can see how you’re talked about online and the search demand index to see how popular you are in searches.
