AI visibility: why SEO alone is no longer enough

If your plan for AI visibility is “keep doing SEO”, you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

AI tools don’t decide who to recommend based on your website alone. They look at your whole digital footprint: reviews, social channels, press coverage, forums and directories. In other words, digital word of mouth. SEO still matters, but it’s no longer the only thing holding up your visibility.

We’ve pulled together the latest research on how AI engines choose which brands to mention, including UK data where it exists. Alongside the data, we share what we think it means for brands and where AI search is heading.

Key takeaways:

• AI visibility is shaped by your whole online presence, not just your website.
• AI doesn’t give people a page of ten results. It gives them a shortlist, and you need to make it.
• Each AI engine favours different sources, so no single channel covers them all.
• SEO still gets you in the draw. Your wider footprint decides whether you’re picked.

Staying competitive: invest in the channels your audience uses

The brands AI recommends are the ones being talked about in lots of places. The data backs this up:

• Brand mentions beat links. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found brand web mentions had the strongest correlation (0.664) with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews. Link metrics showed only moderate to weak correlations.
• UK use of AI is surging. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024.
• UK shoppers act on AI recommendations. In a survey of 2,564 UK consumers, 48% said they would consider buying from a brand recommended by AI, even if they had never heard of it.
• YouTube is now a major source. Meltwater data reported by Digiday found YouTube was the most-cited platform across eight AI products in August 2026, overtaking Reddit.
• LinkedIn punches above its weight. A Semrush study of 325,000 prompts found LinkedIn appears in 11% of AI responses on average across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google AI Mode.

That doesn’t mean every brand needs to be on every platform. The right mix depends on your goals and your audience. A B2B software company might focus on LinkedIn and review sites like G2. For hotels, [Peec AI found] Booking.com and Airbnb often outrank Reddit as AI sources. A local trade business will lean on Google reviews and local directories.

The question to ask isn’t “are we ranking?” It’s “where are our customers (and the AI tools they use) looking for answers, and are we there?”

Every AI engine has its favourite sources

There’s no single channel that covers every AI tool. Peec AI analysed 30 million citations across the five biggest AI search platforms, and each one leans on a different mix:

AI platform	Top 5 most-cited sources
Google AI Mode	YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp
Google AI Overviews	YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium
Gemini	Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Medium, PCMag / Forbes
Perplexity	Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, G2
ChatGPT	Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes, Techradar, LinkedIn

Source: Peec AI, most-cited domains by engine, March 2026. This is US data. We haven’t yet seen an equivalent UK study, but the platforms are the same ones UK audiences use.

A few patterns stand out:

• Reddit and YouTube are the only universal signals. They appear in the top five for all five platforms.
• Google’s AI tools favour social content like Facebook and Yelp, while ChatGPT leans editorial, citing publishers like Forbes and Techradar.
• Wikipedia matters for ChatGPT and Perplexity, but doesn’t make Google’s top five.
• G2 only shows up for Perplexity, which is worth knowing for B2B brands.
• Facebook blocks Perplexity’s crawlers entirely, so a Facebook presence does nothing for you there, though it still counts on Google’s AI surfaces.

The takeaway? Each AI engine pulls from its own mix of sources, as the table above it shows. If your brand is only strong on one platform, only the AI tools that use that platform will find you. Anyone using a different AI tool won’t see you recommended

SEO alone won’t carry your AI visibility

For years, SEO was the main lever for being found online. In AI search, it’s one lever among many. Relying on SEO alone to cover your AI visibility leaves most of the iceberg unaccounted for.

The clearest sign is how loosely AI citations now track Google rankings:

• In July 2025, Ahrefs found 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google’s top 10.
• By 2026, an updated Ahrefs analysis of 863,000 keywords found that figure had fallen to 38%.
• For standalone AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity), only around 11% of citations overlap with Google and Bing’s top 10.

Why the gap? Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode use a “query fan-out” technique, running multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build an answer. So the AI isn’t just reading the results for one keyword. It’s pulling from a much wider pool, and that pool includes reviews, forums, videos and social posts.

AI mention factors: when reviews decide who gets mentioned

Beyond rankings, there’s a set of signals we call AI mention factors: the signals that decide whether your brand is mentioned at all. Two stand out.

Review gaps. One pattern we’re watching closely is the review gap. If two competing brands have very different ratings (say 4.8 stars versus 3.1 stars), the lower-rated brand is unlikely to be mentioned alongside the higher-rated one. The gap is simply too big for the AI to treat them as comparable options. BrightLocal’s US research found recommended local businesses average 4.3 stars on ChatGPT, 4.1 on Perplexity and 3.9 on Gemini. Review platforms such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, G2 and Clutch also all feature among the 100 most-cited domains in AI search.

Freshness matters too. In UK research by Reputation and CGA by NIQ, 73% of consumers said they don’t trust reviews older than three months, and 26% said they already use AI to discover restaurants, pubs and bars.

Industry trust signals. Every industry has its own factors that matter most. A brand holding a relevant certification may be mentioned over a competitor with a 4.9-star rating but no certification. In some sectors, accreditations, awards or regulatory memberships carry more weight than star ratings.

The lesson is that your reputation off your website, on review sites, in industry bodies and across social channels, now directly shapes whether AI puts your name forward.

Where SEO still fits (and what happens without it)

None of this means SEO is dead. It’s the tip of the iceberg: the visible part everything else builds on. Here’s why it still matters.

AI tools still use search engines

Google’s own guidance is clear. To appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Google also states that SEO best practices remain relevant for its AI features, from crawlable pages and internal linking to an up-to-date Business Profile.

ChatGPT works in a similar way. OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers, with Microsoft Bing widely reported as one of them. If search engines can’t find your pages, AI tools that rely on them can’t either.

And Google is still where most of the UK starts. Ofcom found Google Search is used by 82% of UK adults, handling around 3 billion searches a month, and about 30% of searches now show an AI Overview. Those AI answers sit on top of the search results, and they draw on pages Google has indexed.

Rankings still put you in the draw

Even though the overlap is shrinking, strong rankings still help. In Ahrefs’ 2025 study, 86% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking somewhere in Google’s top 100. Ranking well across a topic, not just one keyword, gives you more chances of being picked up when AI runs its fan-out searches.

The technical side: making sure AI can find you

AI tools can only recommend what they can access. Most of the work that makes that possible is technical SEO, and it’s often overlooked:

• Letting AI crawlers in. AI tools use their own crawlers, separate from Google’s. OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and recommends allowing it in your robots.txt file. One line in that file, or a security setting at your hosting provider, could be enough to keep you out of ChatGPT’s answers.
• Making content readable without JavaScript. Research by Vercel found that major AI crawlers, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, didn’t render JavaScript. If your key content only loads through JavaScript, Google may see it, but other AI tools might not.
• Not forgetting Bing. ChatGPT draws on third-party search providers, and Microsoft’s Copilot runs on Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools now includes an AI Performance report showing how often your pages are cited in Copilot.
• Keeping your data accurate. Google says there’s no special schema or AI file needed to appear in its AI features. It does recommend structured data that matches your page content, and an up-to-date Merchant Center and Business Profile.

Your website is where AI recommendations get checked

Being mentioned is only half the job. In the same survey of 2,564 UK consumers, 79% said they double-check AI recommendations. Their next steps were to search for the brand on Google or another search engine (46%), check online reviews (43%) and visit the brand’s website (32%). Only 4% would buy from an unfamiliar brand on the AI’s word alone.

The cost of skipping SEO

Without the basics in place, you risk:

• Pages that aren’t indexed, which makes them ineligible for Google’s AI features altogether.
• Fewer chances to be cited, as you drop out of the search results AI tools draw on.
• Losing the click, if people verify an AI recommendation and find a website that doesn’t deliver. A fast, clear, well-built website is what turns that check into an enquiry.
• No way of knowing whether it’s working. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are where AI-driven visibility starts to show up. Without them, you’re guessing.

So SEO isn’t the whole strategy. But without it, the rest of the iceberg has nothing to stand on.

The final takeaway

Search has changed, and so has what it takes to stay competitive. SEO gets you in the draw, but AI tools decide who to recommend based on everything said about you across the web. People think the same way: in the UK survey above, 60% said they’re more likely to trust an AI recommendation when it’s backed by multiple sources, such as articles, reviews and influencer content.

Our view is simple, the brands that win in AI search will be the ones that show up consistently, wherever their customers and the AI tools they use are looking.

That might mean building your reviews, investing in YouTube or LinkedIn content, publishing content that answers your customers’ questions, earning press coverage, or getting listed in the directories and industry bodies that matter in your sector. Start with your goals and your audience, then build out from there.

Want a hand? We can help you understand how your brand shows up in AI search today, and which channels to focus on next, from AI SEO and PR & Outreach, Social media management to Paid Social.

Frequently asked questions about AI visibility