Will AI assistants link when brands are mentioned? For Ahrefs, only 28% of the time

AI assistants constantly mention brands but rarely include links. When I tracked Ahrefs’ brand mentions across six AI platforms, I found that they linked to Ahrefs only 10% of the time in AI Overviews, but up to 50% of the time in Perplexity.

But more importantly: in our case, it is mentioned that Do Contains links that appear in bulk queries. This means that your actual visibility (measured by impressions rather than raw citation counts) is likely to be much higher than the link percentage would suggest.

In this analysis, I’ll show you how tracking mentions alone paints an incomplete picture, why search volume is the best indicator of AI tip popularity, and how to measure your own brand’s AI citations.

Key findings: You are mentioned often, but rarely contacted

AI assistants mention our brand far more often than they contact us.

Using Brand Radar to pull more than 31,000 brand mentions from a database of 150 million tips, I found that the AI ​​overviews were the stingiest—they only included 10.7% of links. Puzzle, on the other hand, is the most generous, connecting 51.6% of the time. Other platforms fall somewhere in between.

• 10.7% of time spent on AI overview
• Gemini 16.8%
• Co-pilot 26.1%
• 26.9% on ChatGPT
• 36.8% adopt AI mode
• 51.6% confused

This means that on these AI assistants, our brand is mentioned without a link 50-90% of the time; the average is about 28% of the time.

Here’s how to check your brand brand radar:

1. Insert your brand name.
2. Go to AI response report.
3. Set filters to exclude your domain range (as shown in the screenshot below)
4. Note the differences and repeat for each AI index.

Impression-weighted mentions tell a different story

I want to understand how often people actually see brand mentions linked to our website (i.e. their impressions) compared to how often brand mentions are not mentioned. Once I factor in Google search volume, the percentage of mentions with links jumps even higher.

So even though most AI mentions don’t contain links, those that do tend to appear in higher-traffic queries, meaning they’ll be seen by more people.

Here’s how often link mentions appear, weighted by impressions:

• Use Perplexity 78.4% of the time
• 71.3% Gemini
• 46.2% use AI mode
• 36.6% on ChatGPT
• Co-pilot 31.7%
• 13.0% Artificial Intelligence Overview

In other words, you may only get links 20% of the time, but since those links appear in a large number of queries, more than 20% of people will actually see your citation.

To check your own brand, follow the same steps above, just switch from the Mentions tab to the Impressions tab.

Why your brand’s link mentions in AI answers don’t always match its visibility

At Ahrefs, we always focus on pursuing high-traffic keywords in our SEO strategies. Therefore, we cannot determine whether AI platforms naturally cite sources more frequently in popular queries.

What we can say is that our focus on high-traffic topics in SEO strategies seems to be shifting to AI visibility as well. Our brands tend to be referenced by more popular keywords – the keywords we prioritize in our SEO efforts.

This is why mentions with links end up being seen by more people, despite having more overall mentions without citations.

What this means for your AI visibility strategy

Each AI platform has its own way of citing sources, which we cannot fully control. but we can improve AI visibility By using SEO to optimize for popular keywords in traditional Google searches.

Think of search volume as a proxy for rapid popularity. For example, if 10,000 people search for “best SEO tools” on Google every month, thousands of people may ask similar questions to an AI assistant, even if they’re worded differently. By focusing on high-traffic keywords, you can really stay consistent with the most common AI tips.

This is even more important since AI assistants don’t rely on a single precise query. When someone asks a question, the AI ​​will typically run several related “fan-out queries” (basically different versions or subdivisions of the original prompt) in the background to glean more context.

You can’t predict these exact changes, but if you cover a topic thoroughly, you’re more likely to be cited across all topics.

Of course, AI may only mention or link to your site 20-30% of the time. However, when you have a high-traffic topic, these small percentages show up in thousands of queries, greatly increasing visibility.

Have questions or comments? find me LinkedIn.