New SEO data suggests AI Overview citations are increasingly diverging from traditional rankings while Bing updates guidance around AI search visibility.
Some new data suggests the relationship between traditional rankings and AI citations may be changing.
Recent analysis looking at hundreds of thousands of keywords found that pages cited inside Google AI Overviews are no longer strongly aligned with the top ranking organic results. In earlier studies, about 76% of cited pages also ranked in the top 10. Updated data now suggests that number has dropped to around 38%, meaning the majority of AI citations now come from pages outside the top ranking positions.
That shift suggests ranking position may be a weaker predictor of AI visibility than it was only a few months ago.
One explanation discussed in the analysis is the way AI answers are assembled. When AI Overviews are generated, the system may break the original query into multiple related sub-queries and retrieve information from several result sets before generating the final answer. This means the pages cited by the AI may not always be the pages ranking for the exact query users typed.
In practice, that allows pages outside the first page of results to appear as sources inside the AI answer.
At the same time, Bing appears to be adjusting how it communicates guidance around AI search and publisher visibility. The messaging suggests that search platforms themselves are still experimenting with how AI systems select, cite and surface sources.
None of this necessarily means rankings are becoming irrelevant. But it may indicate that search visibility is slowly splitting into two layers: traditional ranking position and AI citation visibility.
If the pattern continues, SEO strategies may increasingly focus not only on ranking highly but also on producing content that can be extracted, referenced and cited inside AI-generated answers.
For now these are still early signals, but it is something many in the SEO community are watching closely as AI search continues expanding.
Early signals show AI Overview citations diverging from traditional rankings
