A new study by digital marketing agency Seer Interactive shows that high-ranking brands on Google are getting more mentions in large language models, proving there is a correlation between Google rankings and ChatGPT AI-generated answers.
The study
Product development director Christina Blake and SEO manager Nick Haigler from Seer Interactive say they conducted the study to “tackle the big picture” on LLM outputs to establish how AI is changing the rules for brand visibility and how people search for them.
Haigler wrote:
- “AI is changing how your customers search and rewriting the rules of brand visibility. As marketers, we need to understand what makes large language models (LLMs) call out some brands and not others when relevant questions are asked.”
The study also aimed to answer the following questions:
- “Do top Google or Bing rankings boost LLM mentions?”
- “Does diverse content (images, videos, ads) make brands more visible?”
- “Are backlinks and domain rank the secret sauce behind mentions?”
The results
To better understand the big picture, Seer Interactive ran 10,000 questions in SaaS industries and finance through GPT4o API to establish which ones generated brand mentions.
Here’s what they found:
- “Brands ranking on page 1 of Google showed a strong correlation (~0.65) with LLM mentions. Bing rankings also mattered, but less so (~0.5–0.6). We expected backlinks to play a big role, but their impact was weak or even neutral. Multi-modal content didn’t move the needle as much as we thought it would.”
Their study also determined that rankings on search engines seem to influence LLM mentions, but content variety and backlinks had little effect:
- “Search rankings appear to play some role in influencing LLM mentions, but they’re not the whole story. PR, partnerships, and on-page strategies are areas we’ll be digging into next.”
Studies show a new trend
Seer Interactive’s study isn’t the only one showing that high search engine rankings influence AI-generated answers.
A recent study by DemandSphere and Botify shows that “75% of Google AI Overview links come from the top 12 organic rankings.”
That report emphasizes the fact that ranking well in search results is essential for site visibility on LLMs:
- “Our cosine similarity analysis showed a distinct correlation between the semantic similarity of linked websites and the AI-generated text of the AI Overview itself. Essentially, the closer your content satisfies the same consumer intent and need as the AI Overview’s summary, the more likely it is to be cited and linked.”
The last sentence is the most important for content creators who want their publications to be cited and linked.
High-quality content is the secret sauce
There’s no escaping that high-quality, relevant content that answers the user’s search query is essential for ranking well on Google, and now it also appears on LLMs. All publishers need to do now is figure out how to optimize their content for both.
