Google AI Overviews and AI Mode cite YouTube more than any other site, and Reddit comes second among target sites in both. Video and community pages take 34.9% (AI Overviews) and 37.3% (AI Mode) of the citations to their 100 most-cited target sites, against an average of 5.8% for the other five engines, and roundups, which dominate everywhere else, take about half or less.
This note looks at Google's two engines together; the cross-engine headline numbers are in what seven AI engines cite. Each number below says which of two lists it comes from:
- All hosts counts every cited site except cituna.com, including the domains of the competitors Cituna tracks and the engines' own properties, such as google.com.
- Target sites leaves out those two groups: what remains is publishers, directories, communities, video and the blogs of companies outside the tracked list.
How many sources the Google engines cite
AI Overviews carried 4,117 third-party citations in 523 answers, or 7.9 per answer. AI Mode carried 1,814 in 248 answers, or 7.3. The other five engines average 8.2, a figure Perplexity's 20.2 pulls up. AI Mode produced fewer answers in the window than any other engine; the rest produced 523 or 552.
Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that both may use a "query fan-out" technique, running several related searches across subtopics to build a response. What is query fan-out explains the idea.
A larger share of their citations also goes to their top target sites. Their 100 most-cited target sites took 42.0% (AI Overviews) and 43.6% (AI Mode) of all third-party citations, against 21.6% to 36.7% for the other five.
The sites they cite most
Counting all hosts, AI Overviews' top five were youtube.com (371 citations), google.com (263), reddit.com (123), llmpulse.ai (94) and aiclicks.io (93): 944 citations, 22.9% of its total and the highest top-five share of the seven engines. google.com is Google's own property; the last two are tracked competitors' domains. AI Mode's top five were youtube.com (159), reddit.com (94), geoptie.com (52), semrush.com (47) and otterly.ai (45): 397 citations, 21.9%, the second-highest share.
YouTube alone took 9.0% of AI Overviews' third-party citations and 8.8% of AI Mode's.
| Rank | AI Overviews | Citations | AI Mode | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 371 | youtube.com | 159 |
| 2 | reddit.com | 123 | reddit.com | 94 |
| 3 | linkedin.com | 71 | zapier.com | 44 |
| 4 | zapier.com | 71 | linkedin.com | 34 |
| 5 | alhena.ai | 63 | blog.timsoulo.com | 25 |
| 6 | tryanalyze.ai | 41 | cloro.dev | 20 |
| 7 | amplitude.com | 35 | cairrot.com | 18 |
| 8 | industry-lens.com | 35 | tryanalyze.ai | 15 |
| 9 | medium.com | 33 | alhena.ai (tied) | 12 |
| 10 | getpassionfruit.com | 27 | cmswire.com (tied) | 12 |
| 11 | stylefactoryproductions.com (tied) | 12 |
The top 10 places took 21.1% of AI Overviews' third-party citations and 23.9% of AI Mode's, the two highest shares of the seven engines; the other five average 11.1%.
The two engines read largely the same sites. Their top 100 lists share 54 sites, and 91.6% of the citations to AI Mode's top 100 target sites went to sites AI Overviews also cited (80.3% the other way round). Few of their sites are unique: sites cited by no other engine took 4.1% of AI Overviews' top-100 citations and 3.9% of AI Mode's, the lowest shares of the seven.
What kinds of pages they read
| Page kind | Sites | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roundups | 66 | 889 | 51.4% |
| Video | 1 | 371 | 21.5% |
| Community | 5 | 232 | 13.4% |
| Articles | 24 | 217 | 12.6% |
| Review sites | 4 | 20 | 1.2% |
| Reference | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Page kind | Sites | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roundups | 68 | 354 | 44.8% |
| Video | 1 | 159 | 20.1% |
| Community | 4 | 136 | 17.2% |
| Articles | 24 | 128 | 16.2% |
| Review sites | 2 | 12 | 1.5% |
| Reference | 1 | 1 | 0.1% |
The video share is all youtube.com, and no other engine gives video any share of its top 100. Community is reddit.com, linkedin.com and business.quora.com in both, plus instagram.com (13 citations) and dev.to (4) in AI Overviews and facebook.com (1) in AI Mode. Roundups take 51.4% and 44.8%, the two lowest shares of the seven, against 74.8% on average for the other five. Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn in AI answers compares those three sites across all seven engines.
Which questions they answer from which sites
Each site in our data lists up to three of the tracked questions it was cited for.
- AI Overviews has 156 listings: 40 for the six "alternative to X" questions (38 of them roundups), 73 for tool-choice questions and 43 for how-to and definition questions. The how-to listings split evenly, 18 roundups and 18 articles, with six community listings.
- AI Mode has 144 listings: 45 for alternatives (39 roundups), 86 for tool-choice questions and only 13 for how-to questions, nine of them articles.
YouTube is listed against "best AI visibility tracking tool" in both engines. AI Overviews also lists it against the audit-tool question and "what is the difference between AEO and SEO"; AI Mode against "Ahrefs Brand Radar alternative" and "how much do AI visibility tools cost". One video appears among the sampled pages of both.
Where they misread the question
The sampled pages of AI Overviews' top 100 target sites show no misreads. AI Mode had four misread sites with eight citations (1.0% of its top-100 citations): three pages listing Otter.ai alternatives for "best Otterly AI alternative", from fritz.ai (3), itsconvo.com (2) and metaview.ai (2), and a dictionary entry for the word "profound" (merriam-webster.com, 1). The other five engines average 4.9%.
How they compare with the other five engines
| Measure | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Other five, average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Third-party citations per answer | 7.9 | 7.3 | 8.2 |
| Target sites cited | 180 | 110 | 218 |
| Top 5 of all hosts, share of third-party citations | 22.9% | 21.9% | 15.4% |
| Top 10 target sites, share of third-party citations | 21.1% | 23.9% | 11.1% |
| Top 100 target sites, share of third-party citations | 42.0% | 43.6% | 28.5% |
| Roundups, share of top-100 target citations | 51.4% | 44.8% | 74.8% |
| Video and community, share of top-100 target citations | 34.9% | 37.3% | 5.8% |
| Top-100 target citations to sites no other engine cited | 4.1% | 3.9% | 27.4% |
| Top-100 target citations to misread pages | 0.0% | 1.0% | 4.9% |
For a brand in this category, the Google engines are where a video or a community thread can sit among the most-cited sources, and where citations bunch on a few large sites. How to appear in Google AI Overviews and how to appear in Google AI Mode cover what to do about it.
Method and limits
What was counted. A citation is one source URL shown in one answer, grouped by site. Third-party figures leave out cituna.com. The target list also leaves out the tracked competitors' own domains and the engines' own properties, such as google.com; youtube.com is counted as a target site. Each engine's file ranks its 100 most-cited target sites, with ties at the cutoff (three citations for AI Overviews, one for AI Mode) broken arbitrarily. Page kinds are the labels in Cituna's data. Each site lists up to three questions and up to three sample page addresses, and misreads were judged from those addresses.
The window. 33 scans in the 30 days to 22 September 2026, which produced 523 AI Overviews answers and 248 AI Mode answers. "Other five, average" is the plain average of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok.
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 which sites the two engines cited for these questions in this window. They cannot show why they chose them, how they behave in other categories or markets, or what any one user sees, because answers vary by account, location and time. AI Mode's smaller answer count makes its figures less steady than the others. The full method is on the methodology page.