Google AI Mode and AI Overviews lean on Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn far more than the other engines, and ChatGPT, Claude and Grok barely cite them. In our scans of questions about AI visibility tools, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews gave the three sites 15.8% and 13.7% of their third-party citations, Perplexity and Gemini 3.7% and 2.9%, and Claude, Grok and ChatGPT 0.2% or less.
Across all seven engines, the three sites took 1,339 of 28,428 third-party citations (4.7%): reddit.com 580, youtube.com 531 and linkedin.com 228. Third-party citations are every source URL shown in an answer except pages on cituna.com, so each share here is out of everything the engine cited, including the domains of the competitors Cituna tracks and the engines' own properties. The cross-engine picture is in what seven AI engines cite.
How much each engine cites the three sites
| Engine | Third-party citations | To the three sites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | 1,814 | 287 | 15.8% |
| Google AI Overviews | 4,117 | 565 | 13.7% |
| Perplexity | 11,131 | 413 | 3.7% |
| Gemini | 1,910 | 56 | 2.9% |
| Claude | 4,377 | 10 | 0.2% |
| Grok | 2,481 | 5 | 0.2% |
| ChatGPT | 2,598 | 3 | 0.1% |
| Engine | YouTube | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | 94 (5.2%) | 159 (8.8%) | 34 (1.9%) |
| Google AI Overviews | 123 (3.0%) | 371 (9.0%) | 71 (1.7%) |
| Perplexity | 300 (2.7%) | 0 | 113 (1.0%) |
| Gemini | 55 (2.9%) | 1 (0.05%) | 0 |
| Claude | 0 | 0 | 10 (0.2%) |
| Grok | 5 (0.2%) | 0 | 0 |
| ChatGPT | 3 (0.1%) | 0 | 0 |
Share and frequency tell different stories for Perplexity. It cites the three sites 74.8 times per 100 answers, closer to the Google engines than to anyone else, but it cites about 20 sources per answer, so they make up only 3.7% of its citations.
| Engine | Answers | Citations to the three sites | Per 100 answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | 248 | 287 | 115.7 |
| Google AI Overviews | 523 | 565 | 108.0 |
| Perplexity | 552 | 413 | 74.8 |
| Gemini | 552 | 56 | 10.1 |
| Claude | 552 | 10 | 1.8 |
| Grok | 552 | 5 | 0.9 |
| ChatGPT | 552 | 3 | 0.5 |
Reddit: six engines cite it, Claude never did
Reddit is the only one of the three that six engines cite. Perplexity cites it most often: 300 times, tying llmpulse.ai as its most-cited site of any kind. AI Mode gives it the largest share, 5.2%, and in Gemini it ranks fourth among all sites, behind three tracked competitors' domains. ChatGPT (3) and Grok (5) barely use it, and Claude never cited reddit.com in the window.
Each site in our data lists up to three of the tracked questions it was cited for. "How to get cited by ChatGPT" is on Reddit's list in four engines: Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and AI Overviews. Most of the rest are tool questions, such as the Peec AI and Scrunch AI alternatives in ChatGPT and brand-mention tracking in Gemini and AI Mode.
The sampled threads are mostly tool lists, tool comparisons and how-to posts, many in subreddits named for the topic, such as r/geotoolsreview, r/GEO_optimization and r/aeo. One r/DigitalMarketing thread on getting cited in ChatGPT appears in the samples of Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews.
YouTube: only AI Overviews and AI Mode
YouTube is the most-cited site of any kind in both Google engines: 371 citations in AI Overviews (9.0%) and 159 in AI Mode (8.8%), ahead of google.com in AI Overviews. No other engine cited it more than once. Google lists both YouTube and Gemini among its products, yet Gemini cited youtube.com once in 552 answers, so this is not a habit of every Google product.
The sampled pages are video watch pages, and one video appears in the samples of both engines. Both list YouTube against "best AI visibility tracking tool". AI Overviews adds the audit-tool question and "what is the difference between AEO and SEO"; AI Mode adds "Ahrefs Brand Radar alternative" and "how much do AI visibility tools cost". What Google AI Overviews and AI Mode cite covers the two engines in full.
LinkedIn: articles published on the platform
Four engines cite LinkedIn: Perplexity (113 citations, 1.0%), AI Overviews (71, 1.7%), AI Mode (34, 1.9%) and Claude (10, 0.2%). ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok never did in the window.
Almost all the sampled pages are articles published on LinkedIn, at addresses under linkedin.com/pulse: tool lists, a pricing piece, a list of APIs and an article on structuring content to be cited by ChatGPT. That last article appears in the samples of all four engines. LinkedIn is listed against "how to get cited by ChatGPT" in Perplexity, Claude and AI Mode, and against the API question in Claude, AI Overviews and AI Mode. One of Claude's sampled LinkedIn pages was off-topic: an advice page on image compression.
Quora, Medium and X
Two other community-style sites show up. business.quora.com drew 36 citations from Perplexity, 21 from AI Overviews, 13 from Claude and 7 from AI Mode; its sampled pages are marketing resources on Quora's business site, including one on how to get cited by ChatGPT that appears in all four engines' samples. medium.com, which our data labels as a roundup site, drew 33 from AI Overviews, 20 from Claude, 14 from Perplexity, 7 from AI Mode and 2 from Gemini.
x.com appears in none of the engines' target lists. Because those lists leave out the engines' own properties, these files cannot show how often Grok cited X.
What this means for a brand in this category
- For Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, a YouTube video or a Reddit thread can sit among the most-cited sources for a buying question.
- For Perplexity, Reddit threads and LinkedIn articles are regular sources, though a small share of a very long list (what Perplexity cites).
- For ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, the three sites barely register; roundups and articles carry the weight (what Claude cites).
Method and limits
What was counted. A citation is one source URL shown in one answer, grouped by site. Counts for reddit.com, youtube.com and linkedin.com come from Cituna's per-engine citation counts for each site; an engine with no count for a site did not cite it in the window. Shares divide those counts by the engine's third-party citations, which leave out cituna.com only. The questions and sample pages come from each engine's own list, which gives up to three of each per site.
The window. 33 scans in the 30 days to 22 September 2026, which produced 552 answers each from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok, 523 from AI Overviews and 248 from AI Mode.
The questions. They are about one software category, AI visibility tools, and they are the questions Cituna tracks for itself, listed in the cross-engine note.
What the numbers can and cannot show. They show how often each engine cited these three sites for these questions in this window. They cannot show why, whether the same holds in other categories or markets, or what any one user sees, because answers vary by account, location and time. Site-level counts cannot separate one thread, video or article from another. The full method is on the methodology page.