# Ahrefs — the record

SEO tooling vendor whose AI-citation studies and datasets keep producing the category's reference numbers.

Two items, both from July 2026, both datasets rather than products. Ahrefs published citation-share rankings of the 50 most-cited domains across four AI surfaces — Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, tracked on US queries — with AI Overviews led by YouTube at 21.1% mention share, then Reddit (18.5%), Facebook (10.7%), Google itself (7.1%) and Instagram (5.8%). Days later it shipped a free llms.txt generator built on its own analysis of adoption across 137,000 domains. Both are vendor-published and labeled as such on the wire. The record is thin on method: it does not carry Ahrefs' query sets, its geography beyond US, its sampling period, or how its mention-share counting compares with other measurers'.

Also known as: https://ahrefs.com/ · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahrefs · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q107533769

- 2026-09-16: Ahrefs: AI Overviews cut CTR 23% in France (https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-16-ahrefs-ai-overviews-cut-ctr-23-in-france/)
  Ahrefs tracked 963 high-traffic French domains through Google Search Console for 28 days before and 9 days after AI Overviews launched in France on July…
- 2026-08-18: Ahrefs study: llms.txt files mostly unread by AI crawlers (https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-ahrefs-study-llms-txt-files-mostly-unread-by-ai-crawlers/)
  An Ahrefs analysis spanning roughly 15 million data points found 97% of sites' llms.txt files were never read by AI crawlers and that adding schema markup…
- 2026-08-17: AI models agree on brand visibility only 11% of the time (https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-17-ai-models-agree-on-brand-visibility-only-11-of-the-time/)
  A Fractl analysis of 4,320 AI responses to 96 industry prompts across GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Claude Sonnet 4.6 — drawn from roughly 8,500 unique…
- 2026-07-24: Ahrefs launches a free llms.txt generator tool (https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-24-ahrefs-launches-a-free-llms-txt-generator-tool/)
  Ahrefs released a free web tool that builds an llms.txt file for any domain, drawing on the company's prior analysis of llms.txt adoption across 137,000…
- 2026-07-23: Ahrefs ranks the 50 most-cited domains across four AI surfaces (https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-23-ahrefs-ranks-the-50-most-cited-domains-across-four-ai-surfaces/)
  Ahrefs published July citation-share rankings of the most-cited websites in Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, tracked across US queries…

Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/entity/ahrefs/
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