Study · 14 November 2026
What do Google's AI Overviews cite?
Mostly articles that answer the question, and a lot of video. We searched 48 questions a buyer might ask, in six kinds, on Google in the United States. 42 showed an AI Overview, and those cited 356 pages: 29% were articles and guides, 22% were YouTube videos, 16% list articles, 13% comparison pages and 12% forum threads. Review sites and product pages were rarely cited. Of 212 sites cited, 195 were cited only once.
- pages cited by 42 AI Overviews
- 356
- were YouTube videos
- 22%
- sites were cited only once
- 195 of 212
- pages cited in the median Overview
- 9
Read the text of this video
- What do Google's AI Overviews cite? We searched 48 buyer questions. 42 showed an AI Overview, and those cited 356 pages.
- Cited pages by type: Article or guide 29%, Video 22%, List article 16%, Comparison 13%, Forum or community 12%, Other 3%, Review or listings site 3%. Review sites, help pages and product pages were rarely cited.
- Ask “X or Y?”: 44 of 81 citations were comparison pages. If buyers weigh you against a competitor, a fair comparison page is the page to have, and to be in.
- Ask “How do I…?”: 31 of 88 citations were YouTube videos. For how-to questions, a clear short video is a citable source in its own right.
- The long tail: 195 of 212 sites were cited only once. Local plumbers, electricians and movers were cited next to large sites. There is room for a site nobody has heard of, if it answers the question. One search per question, US, English.
By type of page
Share of 356 cited pages, by type
- Article or guide29%
- Video22%
- List article16%
- Comparison13%
- Forum or community12%
- Other3%
- Review or listings site3%
- Help or documentation1%
- Home page1%
- Product or service page0%
Show as a table
| Article or guide | 29% |
| Video | 22% |
| List article | 16% |
| Comparison | 13% |
| Forum or community | 12% |
| Other | 3% |
| Review or listings site | 3% |
| Help or documentation | 1% |
| Home page | 1% |
| Product or service page | 0% |
| Type | Pages cited | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Article or guide | 104 | 29% |
| Video | 77 | 22% |
| List article | 56 | 16% |
| Comparison | 47 | 13% |
| Forum or community | 42 | 12% |
| Other | 12 | 3% |
| Review or listings site | 10 | 3% |
| Help or documentation | 4 | 1% |
| Home page | 3 | 1% |
| Product or service page | 1 | 0% |
By kind of question
What gets cited depends on what was asked.
| Kind of question | Questions | With an AI Overview | Pages cited | Most cited type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business software | 8 | 7 | 33 | List article (14) |
| Products | 8 | 3 | 17 | List article (6) |
| Services | 8 | 8 | 65 | Article or guide (30) |
| Comparisons | 8 | 8 | 81 | Comparison (44) |
| How-to | 8 | 8 | 88 | Article or guide (37) |
| Local | 8 | 8 | 72 | Article or guide (28) |
Three patterns stand out.
Ask "X or Y" and you get comparisons. For the eight comparison questions, such as "Shopify or WooCommerce for a small online store?", 44 of 81 cited pages were comparison pages. If buyers compare you with a competitor, a page that does that comparison honestly is the page that gets cited.
Ask "how" and you get video. 31 of the 88 pages cited for how-to questions were YouTube videos. For "how do I start a podcast" style questions, a clear video is a citable source in its own right.
Ask about a local service and small firms get cited. The local questions, such as "What should I ask a plumber before hiring them?", cited the guides of individual plumbers, electricians, movers and photographers alongside the large sites. A small business that writes the page answering its customers' question is in the running.
Product questions were the exception. Only 3 of 8 shopping questions, such as "What is the best standing desk under $500?", showed an AI Overview at all.
The sites cited most
| Site | Times cited |
|---|---|
| youtube.com | 77 |
| reddit.com | 29 |
| quora.com | 13 |
| zapier.com | 7 |
| forbes.com | 6 |
| nerdwallet.com | 4 |
| xero.com | 4 |
| upwork.com | 3 |
| facebook.com | 2 |
| rtings.com | 2 |
| capterra.com | 2 |
| quickbooks.intuit.com | 2 |
YouTube, Reddit and Quora account for 119 of the 356 citations. After them the list is long and flat: 195 of the 212 sites appear once. There is room for a site nobody has heard of, if it answers the question.
How this compares with other studies
Outrank asked 96 questions of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude on 20 October 2026 and found 74% of the 2,671 cited sources were blog content, counting lists, articles and comparisons together. Our three equivalent types add up to 58%. The rest of the gap is video: Google's AI Overviews cite YouTube heavily, and a study of chat assistants will not see that.
Surfer found that 38% of AI Overview citations point to the first 100 words of a page, across 100,000 citations collected on 2 June 2026. Our study does not look at where on a page a citation points.
How we ran this
- When and where. 2026-11-14. Each question searched once on Google, United States, in English.
- How. Through a search-results data service, accessed through treg, that returns the AI Overview and the sources it links. One request per question.
- The questions. 48 we wrote, 8 in each of six kinds, none naming a brand. Every question and every cited page is in the data file.
- Page types. Fixed rules on each cited page's address and title, in the order shown in the code: forum, video, encyclopedia, review site, help pages, comparison, list, article or guide, home page, product page. Rules are crude in places. 12 pages fit none of them and are counted as Other; most are companies' product pages.
- What was left out. 6 questions showed no AI Overview and add nothing to the counts.
What this does not show
It is one search per question, on one day. AI Overviews change from one search to the next, and a person signed in, or in another country, may see a different one. 48 questions is a small sample, chosen by us. It covers Google's AI Overviews only, not ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, and it says which pages were cited, not which were clicked.
What to do with it
Write the page that answers the exact question your buyers ask, in plain words, near the top. If they compare you with someone, write the comparison. If the question is "how", consider a short video as well as the article. Then check that Google and the AI crawlers can read it.
Use this data
The site-by-site results are published as JSON. Quote any figure with a link to this page. To cite it:
Content Autopilot, “What do Google's AI Overviews cite?”, 14 November 2026. https://apexmention.com/studies/what-ai-overviews-cite