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A new industry report on AI citations, pulling together data from Profound, Semrush, Ahrefs and others, confirms something that changes how a Flemish SME should think about visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Zero-click search rose from 56% of queries in 2024 to 69% by mid-2025, and when an AI Overview appears, the top organic result loses 34.5% of its clicks. At the same time, the data shows the three platforms barely agree on who to cite: only about 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. For a KMO that cannot afford to chase every platform separately, the practical question is not “how do I rank in AI search” but “what single set of actions moves the needle across all of them.” The report’s numbers point to a clear answer, and it is not the one most AI-visibility services are selling.
Backlinks matter less here than they do for Google
Ahrefs checked 15,000 queries and found only 12% overlap between the URLs AI tools cite and Google’s own top 10 results. That is the key fact: ranking well on Google does not automatically get you mentioned by an AI assistant. The stronger signal in the data is brand search volume, how often people search your actual company name, which correlates more closely with AI citation likelihood than backlink profiles do. That is good news for a local KMO: you do not need a national link-building budget, you need people searching your name because they have heard of you through other channels.
Where your name needs to exist, beyond your own website
Entities with a presence on Wikidata or Wikipedia, plus four or more authoritative third-party platforms (industry directories, review sites, press mentions, professional listings), show roughly 2.8 times higher citation likelihood. This is the opposite of chasing a technical checklist on your own site. It means:
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, sector directories and any relevant Belgian business registries with consistent name, address and description.
- Get genuine press or trade-publication mentions, even small local ones, rather than one more guest post on an unrelated blog.
- Keep review platforms (Google Reviews, Trustpilot, sector-specific ones) current, since these show up as third-party confirmation of who you are.
We cover the foundational version of this in our GEO optimisation guide: what generative engine optimisation is and why your business might not be named at all yet.
Don’t bet everything on one source type
The platforms pull from different places, and those places shift fast. Wikipedia holds about 48% of ChatGPT’s top-10 source share; Reddit holds about 47% of Perplexity’s. But Semrush tracked 230,000 prompts and found ChatGPT’s own Reddit citation share collapsed from near 60% in early August 2025 to about 10% by mid-September, with Wikipedia’s share falling just as sharply in the same window, on ChatGPT only. Perplexity and Google AI Mode did not move. The lesson for a small business: do not build a strategy around gaming one source, because that source’s weight in any one platform’s answers can change within weeks. Diversify the same way you would diversify ad channels.
A quick word on the llms.txt question
If you have been pitched an “AI-visibility file” for your website, treat it with the same scepticism we laid out when we looked at the actual llms.txt adoption numbers: most major AI crawlers largely ignore it, and it is not what drives citation in this new data either. Brand presence and third-party confirmation are. Save the budget for the actions above instead.
What this means for your SEO budget this quarter
None of this replaces solid fundamentals. Fast, mobile-friendly, genuinely useful pages still matter, as we outlined in our 2026 SEO article. What changes is where you spend the marginal hour: less on acquiring generic backlinks, more on building a documented, verifiable presence of your business name across platforms an AI model actually reads when it is deciding who to mention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean SEO for Google is no longer worth doing?
No. Google still sends the large majority of referral traffic to most SME websites. AI citation is an additional channel to manage, not a replacement for ranking well in regular search.
How long does it take to see a business mentioned by ChatGPT or Perplexity?
There is no fixed timeline, since both platforms update their source weighting and training data on their own schedules. Building third-party presence and brand recognition is a months-long effort, not a one-off fix.
Can a small business realistically compete with Wikipedia or Reddit as a cited source?
Not head-on, but you do not need to replace those sources, you need your own name to show up consistently alongside them: in directories, reviews, press mentions and on your own site, so the platforms have reliable signals to work from.
Need this checked for your business?
We can audit where your business currently stands in AI search results and which three actions would move the needle fastest, instead of a generic checklist. Get in touch via our contact page and we will walk through it together.
About Creative Edge
Creative Edge is a marketing agency based in Antwerp, specialized in websites & apps, tailored marketing, smart automation, and content & video for Flemish SMEs. We combine practical experience with the latest AI technology to help businesses move forward — without empty promises.