Article · 8 min read

Google Seems More Biased Towards Big Brands Than ChatGPT and Perplexity

Patrick Stox · Ahrefs Free Intermediate

The good news for a small company, quantified: brand size correlates strongly with Google AI Overviews (0.65) but weakly with Perplexity (0.30) and barely at all with ChatGPT (0.15). That gap is the opening a young Indian brand can actually walk through.

  • Web mentions correlate 0.65 with visibility in Google AI Overviews but only 0.30 in Perplexity and 0.15 in ChatGPT.
  • Based on roughly 76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts and 953.5k Perplexity prompts from June 2025.
  • The practical read: brand-building buys you Google AI visibility, but ChatGPT and Perplexity are far more open to smaller names.

The question it answers

  1. SEO used to mean ranking on Google. What does it mean now that buyers ask ChatGPT instead?

Read with it

  1. Graphite's Ethan Smith has run this for real clients, so the advice is specific: landing pages, YouTube and genuine Reddit... Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · 80 min listen The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product Ethan Smith with Lenny Rachitsky
  2. The evidence behind the strategy shift, at a sample size nobody else has published: branded web mentions correlate at 0.664... Ahrefs Report · 15 min read An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied) Louise Linehan and Xibeijia Guan
  3. Two former Freshworks leaders discovered their content was fine and their distribution was missing, and built Highperformr off... Inc42 Article · 8 min read How These Ex-Freshworks Executives Are Rewriting Rules Of Content Distribution Pooja Yadav
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