Google's AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% to 50% of all US search queries, up from just 6.49% in January 2025, according to TechBullion's analysis of agencies serving tech founders.
For business-to-business technology searches, that figure rises to 82%, a 128% year-over-year increase, and brands cited inside those answers earn 120% more organic clicks per impression than competitors left out.
The shift has pushed link building from a public-relations afterthought toward what TechBullion frames as a core growth lever: if a startup's name isn't in the AI's source list, it risks effective invisibility to prospects.
That reflects a broader change in how citations work. Through much of 2025, roughly 76% of AI Overview citations still came from pages ranking in Google's organic top 10; by early 2026, that share had fallen to roughly 38%, meaning most citations now originate outside the traditional top rankings.
TechBullion's evaluation weighted agencies on AI-visibility fit, pricing flexibility, software-as-a-service specialisation, delivery speed and verified client results.
It cites a separate study of 75,000 brands that found web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against just 0.218 for backlinks alone, roughly three times more predictive.
Digital PR has overtaken guest posting as the top-ranked link-building tactic, favoured by 34% of SEOs versus 18%.
PressHERO, founded by Maurizio Petrone, topped the list for listicle placements starting at $250 with a 12-month live-link guarantee, citing an 8.5x organic traffic increase reported by VidMage.ai's chief marketing officer Span Chen.
SayNine, which targets SaaS and tech firms through a network of over 3,000 publishers, reported a 30% organic traffic increase for EasyDMARC, according to its chief executive Gerasim Hovhannisyan.
