Which websites actually get cited in AI Overviews?

Ask Google "best CRM for a two-person team" and you'll get an AI Overview before you get a single blue link. Read where it sourced that answer. There's a YouTube video, a Reddit thread from eighteen months ago, a Wikipedia page, and — if the vendors are lucky — one comparison article.

What isn't in there is any of those vendors' own websites. Not the homepage they rewrote four times, not the feature page, not the pricing page, not the 3,000-word pillar post they commissioned to rank for exactly that query.

That's not bad luck. It's the shape of the entire citation layer, and it's remarkably consistent across every study that's looked at it. This post is the data: which domains AI answer engines actually quote, how the mix flips depending on whether you're looking at Google, ChatGPT or Perplexity, why brand-owned pages lose so badly, and — the part most write-ups skip — why you should treat every number below with a healthy dose of suspicion, including the ones I'm about to show you.

The most-cited domains in Google's AI Overviews

Ahrefs ran 3 million US queries through Brand Radar in June 2026 and counted where AI Overviews pulled their sources from. The top ten:

Rank	Domain	Mention share
1	youtube.com	20.9%
2	reddit.com	19.6%
3	facebook.com	11.6%
4	google.com	6.0%
5	instagram.com	5.2%
6	en.wikipedia.org	4.8%
7	amazon.com	4.0%
8	quora.com	4.0%
9	tiktok.com	3.6%
10	walmart.com	0.9%

Read that "mention share" column carefully, because most articles quoting these numbers get it wrong. It's each domain's citations as a percentage of the combined citations of the top 50 sources — not as a percentage of every citation on the internet. Reddit is not 19.6% of all AI Overview citations. Reddit is 19.6% of the slice that the fifty biggest sources carve up between them.

That distinction matters, and I'd rather hand you a smaller true number than a bigger false one. What the table does support is this: among the domains that dominate, three platforms — YouTube, Reddit and Facebook — take just over half the citation share between them. The concentration is the story. The top five domains account for roughly 38% of citations and the top twenty for about 66%, which leaves the remaining third to be split between thousands of everyone-elses.

Also worth noticing what isn't on that list. There is not a single company's own marketing site in the top ten. The list is video, forums, social, an encyclopedia, and two retailers.

It isn't one leaderboard. It's three.

Here's where the "just get on Reddit" advice starts to fall apart. The engines have genuinely different personalities, and if you optimise for the wrong one you're solving somebody else's problem.

Profound analysed 680 million citations across the three big engines between August 2024 and June 2025. Looking at how concentrated each engine's top ten sources are:

• ChatGPT is an encyclopaedia reader. Wikipedia alone is 47.9% of its top-ten citations. It behaves like a reference librarian — it wants the settled, consensus answer, and it goes to the place where consensus answers live.
• Google's AI Overviews are social and video. Reddit leads at 21.0% of the top ten, with YouTube and Quora behind it. This is unsurprising given Google pays Reddit for licensed data access, which is about as direct a thumb on the scale as exists in search.
• Perplexity is a forum reader. Reddit is 46.7% of its top-ten citations — a concentration comparable to Wikipedia's grip on ChatGPT.

So "Reddit is what AI cites" is about a third right. It's overwhelmingly true for Perplexity, substantially true for Google, and close to false for ChatGPT, where you'd be far better served by being notable enough for a Wikipedia page — which, if you're a seed-stage SaaS, you are not, and no amount of content strategy will change that this quarter.

The practical version: the engine your buyers actually use determines which platform is worth your time. If your customers live in ChatGPT, a Reddit campaign is not an AI-visibility strategy. It might still be a lead-generation strategy — those are different things, and conflating them is how people end up disappointed with both.

Why your own website loses

The uncomfortable finding, and the one that has held up across every dataset I've read: the pages you control are the pages least likely to be cited.

You can see it in the Ahrefs table without needing anyone's interpretation. Ten slots, zero brand-owned marketing sites. The engines went to YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Wikipedia, Quora and Amazon — places where the thing being said about a product is being said by someone who doesn't own it.

That's not a bug in the models. It's the correct behaviour. If you ask a question and one available source is a company explaining why its product is excellent, and another is forty strangers arguing about whether it's excellent, the second source is genuinely more informative. The model is doing what you'd do.

Which produces an inversion that most marketing budgets are not set up for. The traditional playbook says: build the asset you own, because owned media compounds and rented land is risky. The citation layer says the opposite — the sources that get quoted are precisely the ones you can't control, and your leverage over them is indirect at best.

You cannot write your way into a Reddit citation. You can only be worth mentioning, and then be present in the conversations where mentioning happens.

Now be sceptical of all of it

Every article you'll read about this topic presents the numbers as though they're weather. They're not. They're more like a share price, and the volatility is genuinely alarming.

Semrush tracked citations over three months in 2025 and watched ChatGPT's Reddit citations collapse from roughly 60% of prompt responses in early August to around 10% by mid-September. Wikipedia fell from about 55% to under 20% over the same weeks. Nobody outside OpenAI knows exactly why. A model update, a licensing change, a retrieval tweak — take your pick.

Then in January 2026 Google swapped AI Overviews onto Gemini 3 as the global default, and the citation behaviour shifted again.

Three things follow from that, and they're the reason I'd be wary of anyone selling you a rigid "AI SEO" system:

1. Any specific percentage in this post has a shelf life measured in months. Including the ones I've just quoted at you. Treat the ranking as durable and the decimals as disposable.
2. The studies don't measure the same thing, so the numbers don't reconcile. Ahrefs reports Reddit at 19.6% of top-50 mention share for AI Overviews. Profound reports Reddit at 2.2% of all AI Overview citations. Both are correct. They are answering different questions, and any article that lists both side by side as though they're comparable is one you should stop reading.
3. The direction of travel is more reliable than any snapshot. Across every engine and every methodology, user-generated discussion has trended up, and brand-owned pages have not. That's the finding to plan around.

What survives all the churn is the hierarchy, roughly in this order: community and forum discussion, then video, then encyclopaedic reference, then earned editorial coverage in trade press, then marketplaces for anything commercial — and your own site, last, if at all.

So what do you actually do about it?

Honestly? Less than the "GEO consultants" currently filling your LinkedIn feed would like you to believe.

There is no schema markup that makes ChatGPT cite you. There is no llms.txt file that gets you into an AI Overview. Those things are cheap and you may as well do them, but they are hygiene, not strategy, and anyone charging you a retainer for them is charging you for hygiene.

The strategy is duller and slower: be genuinely, independently discussed in the places the engines read. Which in practice means being recommended in Reddit threads by people who aren't you, having a YouTube presence if your category is one people watch before buying, and earning trade coverage rather than publishing your own.

The Reddit slice of that is the one I can help with directly, and it's the reason ReplyMine exists — it watches the subreddits where your category gets discussed and surfaces the threads where someone is actively asking for what you sell, while the thread is still live rather than four days cold. But I want to be precise about what that does and doesn't buy you, because the temptation to oversell this is enormous and the whole point of this post is not doing that.

Being present in the thread gets your product named. It does not manufacture a citation, and any tool promising you otherwise is either lying or describing astroturfing, which is both against Reddit's rules and — set aside the ethics for a second — extremely bad at working. Reddit threads that read as shilled get downvoted into invisibility, and an invisible thread is not a source anybody's model is retrieving. The mechanism only functions when the recommendation is real. That's inconvenient for marketers and it's exactly why it's still worth something.

The honest formulation is this: you cannot buy a citation, but you can be present, useful and mentioned often enough that the citation becomes likely. If you want the mechanics of doing that without getting your account nuked, the full playbook is here, and the rules for mentioning your own product are the part people get wrong.

The one-paragraph version

AI answer engines overwhelmingly cite places where people talk to each other, not places where companies talk about themselves. In Google's AI Overviews that's YouTube and Reddit above everything else; in Perplexity it's Reddit by a wide margin; in ChatGPT it's Wikipedia by a wider one. The numbers move around a lot and the studies measure different things, so hold any single percentage loosely. The durable finding — the one that's survived every model update and every methodology — is that third-party discussion beats self-description, and it isn't close.

Which means the most valuable page for your product's AI visibility is one you'll never own, never edit, and can only earn.

Pick the engine your buyers actually use. Work out which platform feeds it. Then go and be worth mentioning there.