Answer engine optimization · Research
Only 38% of AI Overview citations rank in Google's top 10
If you've been banking on a page-one ranking as your golden ticket into Google's AI Overview, a study that dropped this March should make you rethink where that effort goes.
Ahrefs grabbed 863,000 keyword SERPs and examined 4 million URLs getting cited inside AI Overviews, more than double their previous sample. The headline stings: just 38% of those cited pages also crack the top 10 organic results for that same query. Filter out the other SERP features and look at plain blue links alone, and you're at 37.1%. Either way, about six in ten citations are coming from somewhere other than the page you'd figure Google trusts most.
So where do those other citations actually hang out? Roughly 31% sit somewhere between position 11 and 100, the pages you'd need to hit "next" a few times to ever stumble across yourself. And another 31% rank past position 100 or don't appear in the regular results at all. That's not statistical noise. That's nearly a third of what AI Overviews cite, pulled from places no human searcher would scroll far enough to find.
Why ranking and citation go their separate ways
Your gut says Google's AI Overview just reads its own top 10 and summarizes it, same company running both systems after all. But the data tells a different story. AI Overviews switched to the Gemini 3 model back in January, and the citation parsing that arrived with it seems to draw from a way wider pool than what's visible in rankings. It grabs whatever answers the specific question best, wherever that page happens to land in the traditional list. Winning at ranking doesn't automatically buy you into the citation.
One source jumps out in that non-ranking 31%: YouTube. Ahrefs found YouTube makes up 18% of citations that don't come from top-10 pages, while representing 5.6% of all AI Overview URLs overall. It also grew 34% over six months as the single most-cited domain in the whole dataset. A video sitting nowhere near page one of Google can still be exactly what an AI Overview decides to quote.
What this actually means if you run a local business
If you've sunk real hours into your Google ranking, that work still counts. A page-one spot doesn't hurt your chances. But treating it as the finish line means you're optimizing for one system while a completely separate one, playing by different rules, decides whether you get named in the answer someone actually reads first. Keep chasing the same keyword phrasing that got you to position 6 or 7, and you might be doing exactly what worked for 2024 search while missing what earns a citation in 2026.
We can't run this exact comparison against our own numbers. Our probe data tracks where a business gets cited across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, plus where each citation lands in the AI's own answer. It doesn't track where that source ranks on Google. So this Ahrefs finding covers a different AI surface than the one we usually test, and we're not claiming our data proves the same pattern. What we can say, from everything we've measured on this blog before, is the general shape rhymes. Directories and Reddit threads that no business owner would think to rank for keep out-citing polished business websites, on every AI engine we've checked. This new number just puts a percentage on the same idea for Google's own AI Overview specifically.
The middle third gets skipped over too often
That 31% sitting at position 11 to 100 deserves its own look, because it's tempting to write it off as "close enough" and move on. These are pages that already surfaced for the search, just not high enough to earn a click from a normal searcher scrolling past ten blue links. An AI Overview doesn't care about that scroll behavior. It's reading further down the list than any person would, pulling out whichever page phrases the answer cleanest, then citing it regardless of whether it sat at position 4 or position 40.
That shifts what "good enough" content looks like. A page that answers one specific question directly, with the exact phrasing a customer would use, can out-cite a page that ranks higher but buries the answer under three paragraphs of introduction. Ranking authority still opens the door. It just isn't what decides who gets quoted once the AI Overview walks through.
What to actually do with this
Don't abandon your SEO work. Just stop treating "I rank on page one" as proof you're covered. That one-third of citations sitting past position 100 tells you Google's AI Overview will reach deep for a page that answers the exact question well. Structure and clarity beat raw ranking authority here. And that YouTube number is a concrete, checkable action: if you've got video content sitting on your own site or buried in a channel nobody watches, that's inventory an AI Overview might actually prefer over your homepage.
The fastest way to know where you stand isn't guessing from a ranking report. It's asking the AI directly, the way a customer would, and seeing exactly what comes back.
Sources: Ahrefs, "AI Overview Citations Study" (March 2, 2026), analysis of 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs via Ahrefs Brand Radar.