Ahrefs just dropped a study that changes how we think about SEO. They analyzed 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs. The findings are clear: the old playbook is broken.
In July 2025, 76% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also ranked in Google's top 10 for the same query. Today, that number has collapsed to 38%. The drop is real. The overlap has been cut in half in less than a year.
Where are the citations coming from now? The remaining citations are split almost evenly: 31.2% come from positions 11 100, and 31.0% come from outside the top 100 entirely. A huge chunk of AI citations are coming from pages you wouldn t even see on page one.
Why is this happening? Query fan out. When a user searches, Google splits the query into multiple related sub-queries and pulls sources from all of them. The pages that appear most often across those sub-queries get cited in the AI Overview, even if they don t rank for the original keyword. The AI answer is not a summary of the SERP below it.
