Across 75,000 Brands, YouTube Mentions Are the Strongest Signal of AI Visibility, New Ahrefs Report Reveals

From how AI platforms choose their sources to the signals that shape brand visibility, Ahrefs' Q1 2026 report documents the new reality of AI search.

SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ahrefs, a leading marketing platform, today released its Q1 2026 AI Search Benchmark Report, a data-driven analysis of how AI platforms surface and cite brands in responses.

The report covers 13 studies, drawing insights from multiple datasets, including 146 million search result pages, 730,000 AI responses, and original experiments run by Ahrefs researchers.

In what is possibly the most notable finding, a study of 75,000 brands found that YouTube mentions correlated more strongly with AI brand visibility than any other metric. By contrast, a site's link volume and total page count showed only weak correlation.

In another study, Google's AI Overviews were shown to have reduced clicks to top-ranking content by 58%.

The report's authors used aggregated Google Search Console data across 300,000 keywords, comparing click-through rates in December 2023 (pre-AI Overviews) with those in December 2025.

Additional key findings from the report include:

• Google sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT. This study, which concluded ChatGPT has around 12% of Google's search volume, analyzed data from 76,000 websites using Ahrefs' analytics offering.
• Across 146 million search result pages, Google's AI Overviews appeared for 21% of all keywords. Their appearance rate varies greatly by category and query length: they appear on just 9.5% of single-word queries, but 46.4% of queries with seven or more words.
• In an AI misinformation experiment, most models repeated fabricated claims as fact. A researcher invented a fake company and planted false claims online. The claims were repeated as truth across nearly every tool, even though an official company FAQ explicitly denied them.

“As brand discovery spreads across AI platforms that each behave differently, tracking and growing online visibility has fundamentally changed,” said Glen Allsopp, Head of Marketing Strategy & Research at Ahrefs. “I expect the teams that win will continue to follow and learn from the data, while prioritizing building genuine authority in their industry.”

The full report is available at ahrefs.com/ai-search-benchmark-q1-26

About Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a bootstrapped, profitable marketing software company with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. It's powered by one of the largest independent web indexes (170 trillion pages) and AI visibility databases (400M monthly AI prompts). The company has continued to invest steadily in new capabilities, including AI-driven monitoring and analytics.