Ranking #1 in Google No Longer Guarantees AI Overview Visibility.
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.
YouTube is a major factor here. Among AIO citations that don’t rank in the top 100, 18.2% are YouTube URLs. YouTube accounted for 5.6% of all AI Overview citations. Video is a first-class source.
The takeaway: The AI Overview is a separate discovery layer with its own logic. Ranking #1 on Google gives you a 38% chance of also being cited in the AI Overview. That’s down from 76%. The gap is structural.
What I'm curious about: Have you noticed your content appearing in AI Overviews but not ranking organically — or the reverse?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
Replies
This lines up with what we've been seeing on our own pages. We're not a pure SEO play, but we've had a couple of comparison/solution pages get cited in AI Overviews for queries where we're sitting well outside the top 10 organically, exactly the "outside top 100" bucket you're describing. It's been confusing until this framing, we kept assuming it was some SERP feature quirk rather than the AI Overview actually running its own fan-out logic against a different candidate set.
The YouTube stat doesn't surprise me either. We've noticed demo/walkthrough style video content (screen recordings, product explainers) tends to get pulled into AI answers even when the parent page ranks nowhere near page one. If that's a "first-class source" as you say, it might be worth treating video less as a distribution channel and more as its own AIO acquisition surface.
To your question: yes, definitely seen content show up in AI Overviews without ranking organically for the same query, almost never the reverse in our data. Feels like the AIO is optimizing for topical coverage across the fan-out, not literal keyword rank, so a page can be "relevant enough" to get cited while still being too weak on-page (backlinks, depth, whatever Google's classic ranking factors weight) to crack the top 10 itself.
If it's useful context, we build Geode (geodeclarity.com), a transcription/summary tool, happy to dig up which specific pages/queries this happened on if it'd help your dataset.