Does Ahrefs do GEO? Yes, in part. Its own research shows why the rest matters.

The facts that change everything

Three studies of the sources AI tools cite point the same way: most of those sources weren't the brand's own website. Muck Rack's vendor analysis of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini classified 84% as earned media. An independent University of Toronto study of consumer-electronics queries found earned media made up 46–65% of the sources each of four AI tools cited, with brand-owned sites under half in every one. McKinsey reports that, in many cases, a brand's own sites make up only 5–10% of the sources Google's AI Overviews reference, without publishing its sample. The sizes differ; the direction holds. SEO platforms now track that ground: Semrush and Ahrefs both report AI prompts and the sources behind them. The publishing on it is still done by people.

Ranking doesn't carry over either. When Ahrefs compared what AI platforms cite against what ranks on Google, only about 12% of the URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appeared in Google's top 10 for the same question. One vendor's analysis, so hold the exact figure lightly — but the direction is clear: AI draws on different sources.

Sources: Muck Rack, May 2026 (vendor data); Chen, Wang, Chen and Koudas, University of Toronto (arXiv:2601.16858); McKinsey, October 2025; Ahrefs, 2026.

So an AI-visibility tab on an SEO platform is a useful start, not the whole job. It shows where you appear. Answering the buyer questions, in your people's voices and on the right pages, still has to be done.

What SEO tools are genuinely good at

Ahrefs are excellent at what they were built for: keywords, backlinks, technical audits, rankings. If you want to rank on Google, use them. We're not here to tell you SEO is dead.

What Ghostart does instead

Ghostart runs the whole loop. It finds where you're missing from AI answers, builds a strategy, gives each person in your team topics they can credibly own, drafts in their voice, scores it against our Beige-ometer — a check on whether it reads like a real person wrote it — publishes it, then re-checks whether you're being named across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Most of them now offer to write something too. Ghostart's difference is where it starts and who it brings in: your business context and the people who know it, content in each person's own voice, published where you choose, then a check across the AI tools in your plan to see who gets named.