Tim Soulo says ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and AI Overviews often choose different sources for the same answer. X
Ahrefs research found 28.3% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. X
YouTube mentions showed the strongest link to AI brand visibility in the study, at 0.737. LinkedIn
A brand can rank nowhere on Google and still show up inside AI answers. That is the core claim from Tim Soulo, chief marketing officer at Ahrefs, who argues AI search has become its own discovery channel with its own rules.
What Soulo is claiming
AI tools pick sources their own way. For a given query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusion 86% of the time, but cite almost entirely different sources, with only 13.7% overlap. So visibility now depends less on one ranking page and more on where your brand gets mentioned across the web: YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, reviews, forums, and trusted industry pages. Soulo calls citations the new backlinks for the AI search era.
The data behind it (yes, there is a citation)
One commenter asked if this is a real study or just an ad. It is both. Ahrefs analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies in six months. The standout numbers: “Best X” listicles make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT, and 67% of ChatGPT’s top citations come from sources marketers cannot influence, like Wikipedia at 29.7%, homepages at 23.8%, and app stores at 6.6%. A separate finding showed a 0.67 correlation between how often a brand is mentioned across the web and its visibility in AI search.
Why it changes SEO
The job shifts from ranking pages to building real proof around the brand. LLMs understand your brand through co-mentions, the topics and products you appear alongside, so the move is to find your entity gaps and earn mentions where your industry is discussed. The old game is leaking anyway: AI Overviews now cut clicks to the number one result by 58%, up from 34.5% ten months earlier.
The honest caveat
This is Ahrefs first-party research, and the company sells Brand Radar to track exactly this, so read it with that in mind. One finding even cuts against common advice: adding schema markup showed zero meaningful impact on AI citations. Still, the practical takeaway is hard to fake. Real mentions, real reviews, and real conversations are what AI rewards.
Build something good, get the right people talking about it, and AI increasingly helps the right audience find your brand.
Watch and read more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL1W1SMtTT4
https://x.com/timsoulo/status/2061796432534003866
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