Ahrefs

Do AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresh” Content? (17 Million Citations Analyzed)

Do AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity prefer to cite “fresh” content? We analyzed 17 million citations across 7 AI search platforms to find out. As we clamor to optimize for AI search visibility, I’ve seen suggestions that we should update pages more frequently to boost their chance of being cited. To test the theory, we used […]

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Does Ranking Higher on Google Mean You’ll Get Cited in AI Overviews?

If you rank well in traditional search results, does that mean you’ll get cited in AI Overviews? We decided to find out. We pulled one million keywords that triggered AI Overviews and extracted the top three links cited within those AIOs: a total of 1.9 million citation links in our database. We then analyzed the relationship

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8.64% of AI Overviews Appear Outside Position #1 (And as Low as Position #6)

Get the week’s best marketing content AI Overviews aren’t always in the first position in the SERPs. For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position. See where AI Overviews appear outside of position 1 You can use the SERP features filter along with the Position filter to find some of the AI Overviews outside

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Google Thinks AI Mode Is Good for Users, but the Content Isn’t Good Enough to Rank in Google

I set up some tests over a month ago to see if Google would rank content generated by Google AI Mode in the organic search results. Spoiler: it did not rank. Google believes AI Mode content is good enough to show to users in what will likely be the default search mode in the future. But

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AI Overviews Cite AI-Generated Content More Than Human Writing

AI Overviews are AI-generated content, which means they can contain hallucinations. Google uses “grounding” to improve their accuracy, but according to our research, AI Overviews are more likely to cite AI-generated content than human-written content. Here’s what we found: We took one million SERPs showing AI Overviews from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and extracted the top three

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AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed)

In 2023, Google published a blog post stating that they’re not against AI content: If you think about it, there is no clearer signal than the fact that Google has rapidly rolled out AI Overviews (and now AI mode), both of which are basically AI-generated content. Yet there are still many SEOs and digital marketers

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