[IN THE NEWS]
AI
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JANUARY 9, 2025 — Search Engine Land, Ahrefs, Semrush, and uSERP all featured our research on how brand visibility impacts LLM answers in recent blogs. With changes in this space happening rapidly, it's great to see the SEO and broader marketing communities paying close attention to how AI is affecting the digital marketing playbook.
What We Found
Our findings showed brands ranking on page 1 of Google had a strong correlation with LLM mentions — while backlinks had little to no impact, and content variety mattered less than expected. Our study included 300k+ keywords that we narrowed down to 10k relevant questions and ran through ChatGPT to analyze brand mentions.
The Bigger Picture
As Search Engine Land mentions, our findings are supported by a report from Botify and DemandSphere that found AI Overviews were more likely to cite webpages within the top 12 organic rankings. These data points reiterate the growing need for organizations to implement a dedicated GEO strategy alongside their SEO tactics. GEO shouldn't replace your SEO efforts, but the two should work together to help boost brand visibility across search results, AI answers, and AI Overviews.
Our Take: Why It Matters for Marketers
AI is completely changing how people search AND how brands show up in those answers. While search rankings appear to play some role in influencing LLM mentions, our study also shows the continued importance of creating high-quality, relevant content. When it comes to your brand's strategy, we recommend tracking a set of questions on a recurring basis, making targeted changes based on those factors, and measuring how they influence LLM-generated answers.
Also from our study: "We used our SeerSignals website categorization feature to separate solution-focused websites (like SaaS providers or services sites) from noise. When we filtered out forums, aggregators, and similar sites, the correlations between rankings and LLM mentions became even stronger."
Resources
Read the study from Search Engine Land: Google Search Rankings Correlate with ChatGPT Mentions: Study
See the blog from Ahrefs: How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2025 (AKA The Year of the Brand)
Read the blog from Semrush: 12 Benefits of SEO for Your Business: From Traffic to AI Visibility
Check out the uSERP post: Google Search Rankings Influencing ChatGPT Mentions
These study was also cited by
View our original research: STUDY: What Drives Brand mentions in AI Answers?