I don’t think this result will come as a surprise to anyone. Websites that get more traffic in traditional organic search also get mentioned more in AI Search. Popular sites are popular, even if the search system changes.

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.

I compared the website mentions to their worldwide organic search traffic in Ahrefs.

Sidenote.

Brand Radar isn’t just another AI 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 against your competitors. It’s more like Site Explorer than it is Rank Tracker. Plus, we have web visibility so you can see how you’re talked about online, and search demand to show your popularity.

Here’s what Brand Radar looks like.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Let’s dig in.

Spearman rank correlations for mention share vs. search traffic across the top 50 domains in each system:

AI AssistantSpearman RhoP-ValueCorrelation
Google AI Overviews0.470.0006Moderate
ChatGPT0.330.0515Weak
Perplexity0.660.0000Strong
previous study, we saw AI Overviews favored UGC sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Quora potentially more than their topic popularity indicated they should, and we see it again here with search traffic. Google really seems to be relying heavily on these systems, potentially more than they should. Or maybe they just have answers and the type of content that people really want.

While Wikipedia ranks well in Google and shows prominently here, it was actually under-represented when we looked at it for topic popularity. I’d say that Wikipedia may have actually been under-represented in traditional web search. Don’t worry though, Google seems to be correcting that with AI Overviews.

ChatGPT was the wildcard here. They don’t have a traditional search index, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from the results. They still ended up with a decent correlation to organic search traffic.

mentions share vs website traffic top 50 mentioned sites ChatGPTmentions share vs website traffic top 50 mentioned sites ChatGPT

The previous study showed Wikipedia and news sites like Reuters were under-utilized compared to topic popularity, but here that gets corrected. It looks like they may have been under-represented in traditional organic search by Google.

Wikipedia is extremely dominant for ChatGPT mentions. They’re mentioned in 16.3% of the total queries! News is also better represented in this index. In fact, without Wikipedia, the correlation between mentions and search traffic would have been much stronger.

The ones who aren’t doing as well are corporate and entertainment sites. They’re not getting as much visibility compared to how they performed on Google.

LinkedIn or X.

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