In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:
1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.
2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.
3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.
4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.
5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.
6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.
7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.
8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.
9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.
We pulled Chrome apart and found secret classification files. Will you find your site?
Lists baked into the browser that decide what your site is and what AI is allowed to do with it
2M domains tested and a tool to read it live:
https://t.co/CYMGybGGTn
cc @dejanseo
Tired of Xiaomi Mimo always hitting rate limits with public API keys?
Here is a working solution: Go to @gitlawb, install OpenClaude first, then generate your key in OpenGateway
@XiaomiMiMo is available there completely free and unlimited right now. No more restrictions or interruptions
Just tried it myself and it’s running smoothly.
Prepare your site for AI agent interaction with Lighthouse → https://t.co/5myVWdLZd9
If you want AI agents to actually navigate your site properly, the new experimental audit in Lighthouse lets you see:
☀️ Discoverability for AI agents
⚡ WebMCP integration
👀 AI accessibility
#GoogleIO
Our algorithmic content optimization engine is graduating from labs to production. Content Optimizer is now available to all our AI SEO clients.
It does two things:
1. Suggest edits that align your content with AI model preferences.
2. Builds and maintains a living list of the top AI rank factors.
If you've had enough of audits, decks and dashboards and want to do some genuinely cutting-edge AI SEO, ping me and we'll set up a demo.
https://t.co/OcIuVOTqrR
Experimental TasteSkill v2 is out!
This version is very good for Opus/models in cursor.
It uses image gen when available.
Full more complex version is 100% coming next week.
https://t.co/ByHmn0BZb7
guide on how to use this skill ⤵️
the most used skill internally at cursor right now
/thermo-nuclear-code-quality-review
- deletes complexity instead of moving it
- blocks files over 1k lines
- flags thin wrappers and leaked logic
- rejects PRs that work but make code messier
These video settings in CS2 are still the 🐐 in terms of both performance and visibility.
If you want to see the detailed reason why, I have linked the article below where I have benchmarked each of these settings.
I'm about to show you how to get leads from REDDIT without spending a dollar. 🚨🚨
This strategy uses a platform your competitors don't even know exists as a marketing channel.
It takes 30 minutes a week and the results compound for years. Full breakdown below🧵🧵