Does being mentioned on highly cited web pages lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining highly cited web pages as those with more Referring Domains (RD).
These are prominent pages on the web and those that other websites have deemed worthy of linking to. 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, especially here.
I didn’t think this would be any kind of direct signal, but I was curious if there would be differences in the systems. Google AI Overviews shows a strong correlation, Perplexity a moderate correlation, and ChatGPT a very weak correlation.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that prominent brands are mentioned on pages that website owners deemed worthy enough to link to. Google favors brands and Perplexity seems to show some favoritism as well. What’s surprising is the weakness of ChatGPT here. I think they just lean heavily on partnerships for top citation sources.
It will be interesting to see how this changes when we run this for a larger number of websites.
Here are the Spearman rank correlations for mentions on highly cited web pages versus AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:
| AI Assistant | Spearman ρ | Correlation |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 0.70 | Strong |
| ChatGPT | 0.12 | Very weak |
| Perplexity | 0.40 | Moderate |
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.
