Do Pages With More Key Facts Get Cited in AI Overviews?

Evidence From an Analysis of 57,000+ URLs

As AI-generated answers continue to occupy increasingly prominent positions in search results, a critical question has emerged for SEO professionals and content teams:

What differentiates the pages AI systems choose to cite from those they ignore?

To explore this question, we conducted a large-scale analysis of more than 57,000 URLs across 1,591 keywords, comparing the informational content of web pages with the sources referenced in Google's AI Overviews.

This article summarizes how the study was conducted, what patterns emerged, and what the findings suggest for teams aiming to improve visibility in AI-generated search results.

Why Factual Coverage Matters in AI Search

Unlike traditional ranking systems that primarily return links, AI Overviews generate synthesized answers. These answers are assembled by extracting and recombining factual information from multiple sources.

This raises a fundamental hypothesis:

Pages that contain a higher proportion of the essential facts required to answer a topic are more likely to be cited by AI systems.

The purpose of this study was to test that hypothesis at scale.

Methodology

To identify consistent patterns in AI citation behavior, we analyzed:

• 1,591 search queries
• 57,253 unique URLs
• 1.85 million individual fact appearances

How the Dataset Was Built

1. For each keyword, the top 30 organic Google search results were collected, yielding approximately 45,000 URLs.
2. All URLs cited within each keyword's AI Overview were extracted, adding roughly 12,000 additional pages.
3. After removing duplicates, the final dataset consisted of 57,253 unique URLs.

This approach ensured that the analysis included all pages AI Overviews relied on—not only high-ranking organic results.

Defining and Measuring "Facts"

The analysis focused on facts, defined as discrete, verifiable statements that convey substantive information.

For example, in an article about coffee brewing methods, individual facts might include:

• "French press brewing uses full immersion extraction."
• "Water temperature between 90–96°C is recommended for optimal extraction."

Similarly, in content about smartphones, facts could include:

• "OLED displays emit light at the pixel level."
• "Fast charging performance depends on both the adapter and cable specifications."

AI systems do not reproduce sentences verbatim. Instead, they reconstruct answers by aggregating factual statements from multiple sources. For this reason, factual coverage provides a more meaningful unit of analysis than word count or stylistic features.

AI-generated summaries rely on identifying and recombining factual claims across documents rather than copying text directly.

Fact Coverage Metric

To compare pages consistently, we calculated Fact Coverage, defined as the percentage of a topic's identified key facts that appear on a given page.

For example:

• If a topic contains 40 key facts
• And a page includes 12 of them

Fact Coverage = 30%

Pages Cited in AI Overviews Contain More Facts

Across the dataset, pages cited in AI Overviews consistently demonstrated higher factual completeness than pages that were not cited.

Average Fact Coverage:

• AI-cited pages: 31%
• Non-cited pages: 24%

This represents a 29% relative increase in factual coverage for cited pages.

Median values showed an even clearer distinction: the typical AI-cited page contained over 60% more key facts than the typical non-cited page. This indicates that the pattern is widespread and not driven by a small number of exceptional outliers.

The Most Comprehensive Pages Are Reused Repeatedly

Some pages were not merely cited occasionally—they appeared in every AI Overview generated for a given keyword. These were labeled core sources.

Using a focused subset of 110 keywords, we compared three groups:

1. Pages cited in every AI Overview (core sources)
2. Pages cited intermittently
3. Pages never cited

The differences were substantial:

• Core sources: 42% Fact Coverage
• Intermittently cited pages: 34%
• Never cited pages: 23%

Pages most frequently reused by AI systems contained nearly twice as many key facts as pages that were never cited.

These pages tended to provide broader context, address related subtopics, and connect individual facts into a cohesive explanation rather than listing surface-level points.

Most Content Still Misses the Majority of Key Facts

Despite the clear relationship between completeness and citation, high factual coverage remains uncommon.

Across all 57,000+ pages analyzed:

• 28% of pages included almost none of the identified key facts
• Only a small minority reached high levels of factual completeness
• Those highly complete pages were disproportionately likely to be cited

Even among top-ranking organic results, many pages omitted essential context, entities, or subtopics that AI systems appear to consider necessary for a complete answer.

In short, most content explains part of a topic. Very little content explains it thoroughly.

How to Increase Your Chances of Being Cited in AI Overviews

The data reveals a clear opportunity: many pages fail to meet the informational threshold AI systems appear to favor.

1. Focus on Missing Essential Facts

AI Overviews do not reward verbosity or stylistic elaboration. They consistently favor pages that include more of a topic's required facts.

To improve citation likelihood:

• Identify which essential facts competitors include that your page does not
• Replace general statements with specific, verifiable information
• Ensure all core subtopics needed to answer the query are addressed

Search Rank AI's Facts feature, available within its Content Editor, supports this process by highlighting factual elements, entities, and concepts present in top-ranking and AI-cited pages but missing from your content.

The result is not longer content, but denser, more complete content.

2. Monitor and Maintain AI Visibility

Factual completeness is not a one-time achievement.

Topics evolve, competitors update content, and AI systems adjust which sources they prioritize. Maintaining visibility requires ongoing monitoring of:

• Where your pages appear in AI Overviews
• Which competitors are cited most frequently
• Which sources AI systems consistently reuse
• When and where your content stops being referenced

Search Rank AI's AI Tracker provides insight into how often specific pages or brands appear in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, along with the sources each system relies on.

When a page disappears from AI-generated answers, it often signals gaps in coverage rather than purely ranking changes.

Final Thoughts

Across tens of thousands of pages, one pattern emerged consistently:

AI Overviews tend to cite pages that cover a larger share of a topic's key facts.

Whether this effect stems directly from completeness, indirectly from higher rankings, or from overlapping signals, the practical implication is the same. Pages rich in factual content are more likely to be incorporated into AI-generated answers.

For content teams, this is encouraging news. While ranking algorithms and AI selection mechanisms remain opaque, factual completeness is directly controllable.

With Search Rank AI, teams can identify which facts AI-cited and top-ranking pages include, locate gaps in their own content, and systematically strengthen coverage with the information AI systems repeatedly reuse.

For those aiming to increase visibility—whether among human readers, search engines, or AI-generated responses—the evidence points to a clear path forward:

Build content that leaves fewer factual gaps.