Most advice about AI search optimisation is guesswork dressed up as expertise. But a handful of genuine studies have now been published, and what they found is not what most agencies are telling you. The short version: what other websites say about your business matters more than what your own website says.
Here is what the research shows, and what a Melbourne small business should actually do about it.
Your own website is no longer the main signal
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to see which factors correlated with appearing in Google’s AI Overviews. The strongest correlations were all off site factors: branded web mentions at 0.664, branded anchors at 0.527, and branded search volume at 0.392. Backlinks, the metric the SEO industry has obsessed over for twenty years, correlated at just 0.218. ahrefs
The distribution is stark. Brands in the top quartile for web mentions received a median of 169 AI Overview mentions. The quartile below them received 14. tryanalyze
Ahrefs themselves put it plainly: AI visibility is not just about your website, it is about how widely your brand shows up across the web. ahrefs
Worth being honest about what this is. These are correlations, not proof of cause. A brand that gets mentioned everywhere is probably also doing other things well. But the pattern is consistent enough across a large enough sample to take seriously.
Mentions are the new links for local businesses
Whitespark publishes an annual Local Search Ranking Factors report, built from a survey of 47 local search specialists scoring 187 factors. The 2026 edition added a new column scoring each factor for AI search visibility.
Darren Shaw, who runs the report, summarised the result this way: citations as a local search strategy have been decreasing in importance for the past decade, but AI SEO is breathing new life into them. Three of the top five AI search visibility factors are citation factors. His line for it: in AI SEO, mentions are the new link.
Two caveats worth keeping attached. This is aggregated expert opinion, not data from Google. And Shaw notes himself that the AI visibility column is somewhat ambiguous, because a factor might score differently depending on which AI platform an expert had in mind. Treat it as directional consensus rather than precise measurement.
The finding that favours smaller businesses
This is the one worth paying attention to if you are a local business competing against bigger names.
A team of researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi published a paper called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization at KDD 2024. It remains the only genuinely peer reviewed academic study in this space.
Testing across a benchmark of 10,000 queries, they found classical SEO signals such as keyword density had minimal influence on whether content got cited. What did work was the presence of statistics, source citations and quotations from credible authorities, which improved visibility by up to 40 percent.
Then the part that matters most. In their test, a fifth ranked website, the kind that is normally starved of traffic in traditional search, saw a 115.1 percent increase in AI visibility from adding source citations alone. The top ranked site lost 30.3 percent of its AI response share in the same scenario.
The researchers called it the Equalizer Effect. For a local business that has never been able to outrank the national players, this is genuinely significant.
The honest framing: this is one paper, one benchmark, one point in time in late 2023 and 2024. The models have moved on. State it as the only controlled academic test so far, not as settled fact.
Fewer people are clicking through at all
Pew Research Center analysed the browsing data of 900 US adults. About 58 percent conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI generated summary. pewresearch
When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8 percent of visits. Without a summary, 15 percent. Users clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1 percent of the time. aiweekly
Browsing sessions ended on 26 percent of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16 percent without one. aiweekly
One caveat that belongs with this every time it is quoted: Google disputed the study’s methodology after publication. The relationship between AI summaries and reduced clicks still looks real, but other factors may have played a part. theregister
So what does a Melbourne business actually do
- Stop treating your website as the whole strategy. It is the foundation, not the finish line. If your entire AI visibility plan is on page content, you are optimising the weakest correlating factor.
- Get mentioned, not just linked. A write up in a local publication, a chamber of commerce spotlight, an industry association listing, a supplier directory, a genuine “best of” list. Unlinked mentions of your business name across independent sources are doing more work than another backlink.
- Fix your citations and make them consistent. Your name, address and phone number identical across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, True Local, Yellow Pages and your industry directories. This is no longer just a ranking task. It is how AI systems confirm you are a real, single, consistent business.
- Put real evidence in your content. Statistics, named sources, quotes from credible authorities. Not because it sounds impressive, but because it is the thing the only controlled academic study found actually moved citation probability.
- Test it monthly. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity the questions your customers would ask. Screenshot what comes back. Note whether you appear and who appears instead. That is your baseline and your measurement.
Get in Touch with Dreamworx Marketing
Frequently Asked Questions
Do backlinks still matter for AI search?
They matter less than mentions. Ahrefs measured backlinks correlating at 0.218 with AI Overview visibility against 0.664 for branded web mentions. Backlinks still matter for traditional Google rankings, so do not abandon them, but they are not the primary lever for AI visibility.
Can a small local business realistically compete with bigger brands in AI search?
Yes, and more easily than in traditional search. The KDD 2024 GEO study found lower ranked sites gained substantially more AI visibility from adding source citations than top ranked sites did, an effect the researchers named the Equalizer Effect.
How long does it take to see results with GEO/AEO?
Most businesses see meaningful movement within 60 to 90 days of making the foundational technical changes correctly. Consistency fixes and structured data tend to move faster than content, because they give AI platforms reliable data immediately.
Is there a guaranteed way to get recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?
No. Anyone promising guaranteed AI placement is selling something that does not exist. The practical goal is to make your business easy to discover, verify and reference across multiple independent sources.
Sources
Ahrefs, An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors, 75,000 brands studied
https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/
Ahrefs, Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews
https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations
Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671900
Pew Research Center, Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026
https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors