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Free check · 6 items · 4 minutes

Are your ranked list and your generated answer describing the same market?

On our category term they were not: platforms held two of the top ten, and none of the AI Overview's sources appeared in the organic results at all. This check tells you whether yours agree, and what to fix if they do not.

6 items SERP and answer compared Operational noise filtered No email

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The Lifecycle Retrieval Check

Items 1 and 2 are read off the live results page. If platforms hold two or more slots and no AI Overview source ranks, stop before commissioning content.

Item 1

Have you counted how many of your category head term's top 10 positions are held by platforms rather than publishers or vendors?

LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, review sites. Count them in the box below.

Item 2

Have you checked how many of the sources the AI Overview cites also appear in the organic top 10?

Where the overlap is zero, the two surfaces are describing different markets.

Item 3

Have you bucketed your own URLs by lifecycle stage, with logins, OAuth and callbacks filtered into operational noise before any funnel maths?

Operational noise is filtered first and reported separately, never folded into discovery.

Item 4

Do you know what share of your pages ranking in Google's top 10 has ever been cited by an AI engine?

The gap list, again. It is the same join every piece in this series arrives at.

Item 5

Does your lifecycle report carry citations as a line alongside sessions?

Otherwise a page being quoted without being visited is invisible to the report.

Item 6

Is your review window 45 days or longer?

Shorter and you will call a failure that has not happened.

Your numbers (optional)

The first two come off one live results page. The third comes from the citation join.

Your result
Read the method
What you are being scored against

Our own numbers, from a live category results page and our own estate

We scored Split on the SERP and Ranked-not-retrieved on the estate the first time we ran this on ourselves.

MeasuredWhat it is
2 of 10Top-ten positions held by platforms rather than vendors or publishersLinkedIn at position 2, Reddit at position 7, on our own category head term. · Ahrefs, live SERP, September 2026
0 of 3AI Overview sources that also rank in the organic top 10The ranked list and the generated answer were describing different markets. · Ahrefs, live SERP, September 2026
3 of 17Top-10 pages that were AI-citedThe same join, read the other way round: 18% of our ranking pages had ever been cited. · Indexable, 7 September 2026, n = 223 pages
median 6.81 days, P90 37.10 daysHow long citations lag publicationThis is the reason a 45-day evaluation window beats a 30-day one: at 30 days you are reading the lag, not the result. Third-party measurement, not ours — and we hold it second-hand, so treat it as directional. · Profound, 2026, as reported in LinkedIn's 2026 AI Search Visibility guide

One term, one results page, one day; one domain for the estate figures. Results pages are volatile — re-pull before acting. A case study, not a law.

Distribution and measurement come before editorial

When the ranked list and the generated answer disagree, more content resolves neither. Presence on the surfaces being quoted does.

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