AI Mode & LLMs pull info from Google’s top 10 results

Hello, my friend!

Hey hey, it’s Friday — which means I’m back in your inbox with a few updates from the SEO world, my online biz, and some behind-the-scenes life stuff. 😊

Today, I’m going to share some shocking news from the world of SEO and AI, which I’ve actually been telling for a while (if you’ve been following my content).

Here’s the thing:

AI Mode and other LLMs pull info from Google’s top 10 results!

Semrush backs this up with their latest AI Mode study!

Their team examined 5,000 random keywords and over 150,000 AI citations.

What's shocking for me is this: Perplexity.ai matches Google’s top 10 domains in over 91% of cases! 🤯 

So yeah, SEO still matters—a lot.

I’ve summarized the study findings for you below. If you would like to read the entire study, here’s a link for your convenience.

1. AI Mode and other LLMs mirror Google’s top 10 rankings

Turns out, Perplexity's results are closest to what you see in Google’s top 10, over 91% of the same domains and 82% of the same URLs showed up.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, had the least overlap.

Google’s AI Overviews also matched up quite a bit, which shows they’re still leaning a lot on traditional search results.

2. AI Mode responses overlap with Google search results

About 92% of AI Mode answers came with a sidebar that showed around 7 different links.

These links had a 51% domain overlap and 32% URL overlap with Google’s top 10 search results.

3. There’s a little overlap with queries having transactional and commercial intent

While the biggest overlap was discovered for navigational queries.

4. Reddit is a leading citation source

Reddit dominates across AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity and appears in over 40.11% of results with additional links, outpacing traditional brand websites.

What does this mean for you?

Even though correlation doesn’t always mean causation, there’s a strong link between high Google rankings and showing up in AI-generated answers.

So, it looks like the big players in search will likely keep showing up in AI results, too.

From my side, I’ll continue focusing on content that follows Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines since it has helped me grow my website organically and outperform industry giants (I share exactly how I do it in my SEO ebook).

I’ll also stay active on platforms like Reddit to build trust and drive traffic to my site.

How about you? Are you doing anything to boost your chances of showing up in AI search results? 🤔 

For the Premium members: 👋

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Have a great weekend!

Victoria

P.S. If you missed my previous newsletter, you can check it out here.