Ahrefs study — vendor-published
Ahrefs: AI citation stability study finds half of citations vanish within a day, most return
Ahrefs published a study on AI citation stability on Oct. 29, 2026.
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Oct 29 · · Research, AEO, GEO
The record
Ahrefs
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is an 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'.
10 items on the wire, newest first. Elsewhere: official · Wikipedia · Wikidata
DemandSphere study — vendor-published
Google AI Overviews triple on branded search in a month
Google AI Overviews now appear on 82.06% of branded search queries tracked by DemandSphere as of Sept. 29, up from 26.12% on Sept. 1 — a jump DemandSphere…
Via Semrush Blog ↗ · Oct 6 · · Google Search, AEO, Research
AI Overviews branded-search study — vendor-published
Ahrefs: AI Overviews now appear on 83% of branded searches
AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop Google results for branded keywords — any search containing a brand name — as of September 29, up from a…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Oct 2 · · Google Search, AEO, Research
catch-up (May 15)Ahrefs data — vendor-published, from its own chatgpt-vs-google.com panel
Ahrefs: AI chatbots sent 0.28% of web traffic in March, Google 28%
Across 74,752 websites tracked by Ahrefs's chatgpt-vs-google.com, all AI chatbots combined sent 3.5 million visitors in March 2026 — 0.28% of the sites'…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · May 15 · · Research, Engines, SEO
catch-up (Feb 11)Ahrefs analysis — vendor-published; the 65% search share is the author's own classification
Ahrefs: ChatGPT has 12% of Google's search volume; Google sends 190x the traffic
Ahrefs's Patrick Stox set ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion prompts a day (July 2025) against Google's 13.7 billion daily searches, derived from the 5…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Feb 11 · · Research, Engines, Google Search
AI Overviews CTR study — vendor-published
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…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Sep 16 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
Ahrefs study — vendor-published
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…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Aug 18 · · Research, AEO, LLMEO
Fractl study — vendor-published (author is a Fractl co-founder)
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…
Via Search Engine Land ↗ · Aug 17 · · Research, AEO
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…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Jul 24 · · Tools & Vendors, AEO
Ahrefs study — vendor-published
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…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Jul 21 · · Research, AEO