97.7% vs 74.2% informational
StatContent & Social
Almost every AI Overview appears on an informational query, not a commercial or transactional one
Google AI Overviews skew overwhelmingly toward informational queries. Ahrefs distribution: 97.70% of AI Overview appearances are on informational intent against 74.15% of normal search, while navigational drops from 18.87% to 1.23%, commercial from 37.00% to 12.86% and transactional from 19.78% to 2.85%.
Source
The New SEO Playbook for AI Search (Top GEO Ranking Factors) - Ahrefs, presented by Sam Oh (2025)
Ahrefs; underlying studies published at ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation
00:02:36 slide, Ahrefs, The New SEO Playbook for AI Search, November 2025
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StatBrand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility about three times more strongly than backlinksStatThe three strongest AI Overview signals are all off-site brand signals, not site metricsPrincipleEvery credible mention of a brand is another training example tying it to a topicPrincipleChase links-to-page for Google AI Overviews and traffic-to-page for ChatGPT and PerplexityPrincipleLong-tail is now a retrieval mechanism rather than a coverage tacticPrincipleAssistants walk a page's HTML structure and keep it in chunks, not as one documentPrincipleWrite sections that stand alone and still connect, rather than FAQ-style fragmentsStatContent cited by AI assistants is about a quarter fresher than what ranks in organic searchPrincipleFreshness is a retrieval signal now, because retrieval only fires on topics the model does not already knowCaseOne content refresh produced over a thousand new AI mentions to a single pageStatOnly one in seven of the most-cited sources is shared across all three AI assistantsPrincipleEach AI assistant has its own source diet, so one visibility strategy cannot serve all three
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