YouTube is the most cited website in AI answers to buyer questions, with 4.3% of 12,652 citations, almost all of them from Google AI Overviews.

How do you get your website cited in AI answers?

Getting cited depends on matching the shape of your content to the question being asked. Research by Onely across 963 cited pages found that 67.5% of pages cited for comparison questions were lists of providers, regardless of writing style, and a University of Toronto study found that which pages an engine retrieves explains 32% of the variation in citations, against 2.8% for every measured page property.⁴

Formatting matters too, but only after the shape is right. According to Click Laboratory, an AI engine must find a page relevant, understandable, credible and accessible before it will cite it, and the most reliable approach is to lead with a direct, self-contained answer in the first sentences, use question-based headings, and support claims with specific evidence.² For ChatGPT, brand pages dominate, with at least 63% of citations going to brand sites.

Why does Google AI Overviews favor YouTube and Reddit over brand sites?

Google AI Overviews treats YouTube and Reddit as social content signals rather than authoritative sources. According to BrightEdge, Google AI Overviews cites Reddit alongside other community platforms, including YouTube, Quora, Facebook and Instagram, with nearly 29% of its Reddit citations co-appearing with YouTube, the highest co-citation rate in their dataset.³ Google treats these platforms as part of the ambient social conversation around a topic, not as definitive sources.

Ownership and training relationships also play a role. According to ContentGrip, Gemini is trained on YouTube videos and YouTube is owned by Alphabet, and data from LQ Digital cited in the same analysis suggests YouTube videos are 4.3 times more likely to appear in Google AI Overviews than in traditional search results.¹ The chart data is consistent with this: YouTube took 9.2% of Google AI Overviews citations, against a much smaller share for ChatGPT, which instead favors brand and authoritative sites. BrightEdge notes that ChatGPT, by contrast, treats Reddit as a credibility layer, pairing it with medical and financial authorities as the human counterweight to institutional knowledge.³

How much traffic are publishers losing from Google search?

Publishers are losing substantial traffic from Google search. Zero-click searches now account for 68% of U.S. Google queries, up from 49% in 2019, and Google displayed an Google AI Overview on 39.4% of U.S. desktop searches in June 2026, up from 25.8% a year earlier.⁵ A page can hold its ranking position and still see its click-through rate fall because an Google AI Overview now occupies the top of the page.

Google's AI Mode cuts clicks further still. A study of AI Mode search behavior found it reduces clicks to outside websites by 18.8% compared with standard search, with news sites losing 12.5% of their clicks, Reddit losing 21.2% and Wikipedia losing 9.9%.⁵ ContentGrip cites publisher referral traffic declines as high as 60% in some cases.¹ Google has started piloting payments to a small group of publishers whose content feeds its AI products, a sign that using a source and sending it traffic have come apart.⁵