Does ranking high on Google increase your chances of being mentioned or cited by major answer engines?
As answer engines increasingly shape how people discover brands, and many LLMs rely on web search signals to generate responses, an important question emerges: Do traditional Google rankings influence which brands appear in AI-generated answers?
To investigate this, Hoverboard AI analyzed 102,000 AI responses across five major answer engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Grok.
For each prompt, we also tracked Google search rankings for the same query to measure whether first-page visibility correlates with brand mentions in AI responses.
The results were clear: brands ranking on the first page of Google were significantly more likely to be mentioned by every major LLM platform we analyzed.
Source: Hoverboard AI · 102,000 AI responses
Below we can see data for each Google position. For all five platforms, mention rates drop between positions 1 and 5, then plateaus. Even ranking at the bottom of the first page results on Google give brands a significant chance of being mentioned in the prompt response. This validates the importance of SEO in helping brands to improve visibility on major answer engines.
| Rank | Google AIO | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | Grok |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 49.0% | 39.5% | 40.9% | 42.1% | 32.7% |
| #2 | 45.2% | 35.8% | 37.2% | 39.8% | 30.4% |
| #3 | 41.7% | 34.7% | 34.1% | 37.4% | 28.9% |
| #4 | 40.1% | 33.5% | 32.6% | 36.3% | 27.9% |
| #5 | 39.4% | 32.2% | 31.4% | 35.4% | 27.0% |
| #6 | 39.7% | 32.6% | 31.6% | 35.7% | 28.1% |
| #7 | 38.6% | 30.0% | 30.8% | 35.0% | 27.6% |
| #8 | 38.3% | 31.0% | 30.2% | 34.4% | 27.5% |
| #9 | 38.6% | 29.4% | 30.5% | 34.6% | 27.8% |
| #10 | 41.2% | 31.3% | 32.1% | 37.1% | 28.9% |
These were some of our key findings:
- Google rank strongly correlates with AI brand mentions: Domains ranking #1 on Google are mentioned by name 32-49% of the time across all models, dropping to 29-41% at rank #10.
- Google AI Overviews has the highest brand mention rate: 49% at rank #1, meaning nearly half the time a domain ranks #1 on Google, AIO mentions that brand by name. This makes sense since AIO pulls directly from Google’s index.
- Gemini closely follows AIO: 42.1% brand mention rate at rank #1, suggesting Gemini leverages similar Google search data for its responses.
- ChatGPT and Perplexity are in the middle: ~39-41% at rank #1, showing they still favor top-ranking domains but pull from broader source pools.
- Grok has the weakest correlation: Only 32.7% at rank #1, and the flattest decay curve (down to 28.9% at rank #10), suggesting it’s least influenced by Google rankings.
- The drop-off is steepest from rank #1 to #3: Across all models, roughly 5-7 percentage points are lost between positions 1 and 3, then the curve flattens from positions 4-9.
- Rank #10 often rebounds slightly vs rank #9: This is consistent across models and may reflect “last result on page” visibility bias, but we want to run another study to see if this happens again.
- Total citation volume increases with rank position: Lower-ranked domains generate more total citations (more unique domains compete there), but the rate of brand mentions decreases.
1st page Google rankings are very important to brand visibility in the answer engines. For now, they remain one of the most reliable proxies we have for AI brand visibility.
Larger Study Coming Soon
Hoverboard will be coming out with a larger study soon, as we want to continue to dive deeper into the relationship between Google rankings, brand mentions and citations. Just like Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving, so too are LLM models, as they create new and improved versions. What works today for AEO/GEO may not work tomorrow, so constant testing is needed.
Additionally, we are currently analyzing millions of citation data points used by models in their responses. A lot of people online discussing LLM visibility talk about domain authority as a factor for how answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc. choose the sources they cite. But answer engines don’t yet (and may not ever) have the capability to assess domain authority in the same way that Google does. In fact, in our current research study there are significantly more citations with sites that have lower domain authority (DA < 30) than sites with big domain authority. This is something we will be digging into in our next study.