Honestly, it’s messier than the checklists suggest
Every agency, including us, has an interest in telling you there’s a tidy formula for getting cited by ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews. Add this markup, hit this word count, follow these seven steps. Having gone through Ahrefs’ recent research, based on well over a billion data points across more than a dozen studies, I think the honest answer is less satisfying than a checklist, but considerably more useful once you understand it.
The bit that surprised me: schema doesn’t seem to help
Structured data, the behind-the-scenes markup that tells search engines what a page actually is, has long been treated as SEO best practice. Ahrefs tested whether it moves AI citations specifically, tracking 1,885 pages that added schema markup and comparing them against 4,000 similar pages that didn’t. The result across Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT was, essentially, nothing. No meaningful citation increase on any platform (Ahrefs, 2026). Worth a caveat: every page in that study was already being cited 100 or more times before the test began, so this tells us schema doesn’t push an already-visible page higher, not that it’s irrelevant to getting noticed in the first place. But it’s a useful corrective against treating technical markup as the lever that matters most.
Citations are far less stable than a ranking ever was
Maybe we’ve all been looking at this tech from the wrong end. A traditional Google ranking, while it moves, is relatively stable week to week. AI citations are not. Ahrefs found that the content inside AI Overviews changes on average every 2.15 days, with around 70% of the wording differing between two consecutive checks on the same query (Ahrefs, via Tim Soulo, 2026). Interestingly, the underlying meaning barely shifts even as the specific wording and sources reshuffle constantly. That has a practical implication worth sitting with, being cited once is nice, but it’s a snapshot, not a stable asset in the way a page one Google ranking used to be. Chasing a single citation as a KPI is chasing something that may not exist by the following week.
The overlap with traditional search is shrinking fast
While AI is constantly evolving (so treat this with the caution it deserves) This is the stat I’d flag hardest to any client still treating AI visibility as a side effect of good SEO. A year ago, roughly 76% of AI Overview citations also ranked in Google’s traditional top ten for the same query. In Ahrefs’ most recent tracking, that’s fallen to just 38% (Ahrefs, 2026). That’s a structural shift, not noise, AI search is increasingly pulling from a different pool of pages than the one traditional rankings reward. If your visibility strategy is entirely built around chasing page one, you’re now missing the majority of where citation opportunity actually sits.
What does correlate, for what it’s worth
A few signals held up better than the technical tweaks. YouTube mentions, in video titles, transcripts and descriptions, showed the strongest correlation with AI visibility of anything Ahrefs tested, well ahead of conventional SEO metrics like backlinks (Ahrefs, 2026). Freshness matters too, though unevenly, ChatGPT shows a clear preference for newer content, citing URLs on average 458 days newer than what appears in a standard Google search, while Google’s own AI Overviews actually lean very slightly towards older, more established pages (Ahrefs, 2026). There’s no single rule across platforms, which is itself the honest lesson.
There’s also a sobering finding worth knowing before you get too invested in this as a strategy: across the full corpus of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages, 67% come from sources most businesses simply can’t influence, reference sites, homepages, and major platforms, leaving only around a third of citations coming from the kind of blog, review or educational content a typical business can realistically produce (Ahrefs, via Tim Soulo, 2026). That’s not a reason to give up on it, but it is a reason to keep expectations proportionate.
Not even a penny for my thoughts. Where I’ve landed on this.
I wouldn’t advise any West Midlands business to restructure their entire content strategy around chasing AI citations specifically, not yet, not when the target itself reshuffles every couple of days and the research keeps overturning last quarter’s assumptions.
What I would advise is the less exciting version. And this is the version that has been there since the early days of SEO and social media. The advice is to keep producing genuinely well-evidenced, specific, up-to-date content. Treat video as a real part of the content mix rather than an afterthought. And accept that being cited by an AI tool today is a nice signal, not a permanent achievement.
Chase the fundamentals that hold up regardless of which platform is fashionable this year, and the AI visibility tends to follow, imperfectly and unpredictably, but it follows.
You also need to consider that with the constant shift of models being used by AI, the actual thing that catches the eye of the model today, may shift on the whim of a developer (or even on the whim of what the AI has gleaned from its dataset) by tomorrow morning.
Rich Jarrott, the founder of ZenithSpark has been in the Digital Marketing business for over 15 years. While, that’s not a guarantee that we will always understand everything right away, it does point to us having a strong ability to adapt to changes, to re-evaluate and come up with a new plan for our clients to get things back on track when things move. If you’d like to chat with us about what we can offer your business, either use our contact form or call us on Get in touch on WhatsApp.
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