Does being mentioned more on the web lead to more mentions in AI assistants? I’m defining mentions as the number of web pages that mention an entity at least once.
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.
Google has a strong correlation, where it seems like branded web mentions lead to more visibility. The others did not correlate as well.
We saw nearly the same correlation for AI Overviews across 75,000 websites. In fact, Branded web mentions were the highest correlating factor. Here’s the data from that study.
However, Perplexity and ChatGPT did not correlate nearly as much. Perplexity had a weak correlation and ChatGPT a very weak correlation.
Google has favored brands for a long time, and the other AI assistants may not have the same built-in systems for it that Google does. Google favors brands to fight false information, to lean into trusted content. Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt was once asked about the internet becoming a cesspool where false information thrives. He said:
Brands are the solution, not the problem.
Here are the Spearman rank correlations for branded web mentions vs. AI visibility across the top 50 domains in each system:
| AI Assistant | ρ (Mentions vs Visibility) | Correlation |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 0.65 | Strong |
| ChatGPT | 0.15 | Very Weak |
| Perplexity | 0.30 | Weak |
Final thoughts
We’ll run this on a larger sample of sites and see if anything changes, but considering how well the results for Google AI Overviews lined up with the larger study, I’m not sure they will change much.
In the meantime, 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.
