AI is impacting all sort of industries, and web search is one that seems to be changing too.
Ahrefs has introduced a feature that lists out the number of times a domain has been cited by AI models. “Search is becoming AI-first — and so is @Ahrefs. We’ve added a brand new “AI citations” report front and center in our interface to reflect this shift,” wrote Tim Soulo, the CMO at Ahrefs.
“You’ll now see how often your website gets cited by ChatGPT, Google AIO, Perplexity, Gemini, and more… We’re also in the process of expanding our “AI queries” dataset 10x (from ~1M to ~10M). And we’re just getting started. Ahrefs has built its reputation on data quality. And as the world is shifting to AI-driven search, it’s our #1 priority to provide you with the highest quality data to help you navigate this change,” he added.
He shared a screenshot of Ahrefs which showed AI citations. It included the number of times the website had been cited in Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and ChatGPT. The screenshot indicated that the number of AI citations from Google Gemini would be added soon.
For the last few quarters, webmasters have been noticing traffic from AI models including ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini on their sites. This traffic comes from links that are included in the answers that AI models provide. At the same time, AI models like ChatGPT are rapidly climbing up the charts — ChatGPT is now the fifth most visited website in the world. If users begin turning to AI models instead of Google to get their queries answered, it could end up upturn the multi-billion dollar SEO industry.
For more than two decades, websites have been optimizing their content to have it show up more often in Google results. But if users go to AI engines for their questions, traffic to these websites could end up coming from the AI models. This could cause a rethink of how to optimize content so that it shows up more often in the answers given by AI models.
As such, initiatives like Ahrefs’ AI citation checker could come in handy. At the moment, there’s not much clarity on what makes an AI model cite a website in its answers. But features like AI citations could give webmasters a number to aim at — the more times their website is cited by engines, the better — and help in optimizing their websites for this new paradigm of the web.