AI assistants mention brands constantly but they rarely include links. When I tracked brand mentions for Ahrefs across six AI platforms, I found they linked to Ahrefs as rarely as 10% of the time for AI Overviews, and as often as 50% of the time for Perplexity.
But here’s what matters more: in our case, the mentions that do include links appear on high-volume queries. This means your actual visibility—measured in impressions rather than raw citation counts—can be far higher than your link percentage suggests.
In this analysis, I’ll show you how tracking mentions alone paints an incomplete picture, why search volume is your best proxy for AI prompt popularity, and how to measure your own brand’s AI citation rate.
A quick note on terminology
Throughout this article, I’ll use three terms:
Mentions: When AI says your brand name in a response.
Citations: When AI includes a link to your website.
Impressions: Mentions weighted by Google search volume to estimate potential exposure.
The source of the data is Ahrefs Brand Radar.
Brand Radar:
Plug in the name of your brand.
Go to the AI responses report.
Set the filters to exclude your domain scope (like in the screenshot below)
Note down the difference and repeat for each AI index.
AI visibility by using SEO to optimize for keywords popular in traditional Google Search.
Think of search volume as a proxy for prompt popularity. For example, if 10,000 people search “best SEO tools” on Google each month, thousands of others are probably asking AI assistants similar questions, even if they phrase them differently. By focusing on high-volume keywords, you’re really aligning with the most common AI prompts.
And because AI assistants don’t rely on a single exact query, this matters even more. When someone asks a question, the AI often runs several related “fan-out queries” in the background—basically different versions or breakdowns of the original prompt—to gather more context.
You can’t predict those exact variations, but if you cover a topic thoroughly, you’re more likely to be cited across all of them.
Sure, AI might only mention or link to your site 20–30% of the time. But when you’re showing up for high-traffic topics, those small percentages happen across thousands of queries, creating a big visibility boost.
