Which sites do Google AI Overviews cite? Data from 40 searches

If an AI Overview answers a search, the links under it are the pages Google chose to show as sources. Which sites get those links? Most advice on the question is guesswork. We checked.

We ran 40 searches through the Google Search API, recorded every source cited in every AI Overview, and counted. This guide has the results, what they suggest, and the code to run the same count on your own searches. Everything below comes from requests we ran on 16 October 2026. Google’s overviews change constantly, so yours will differ.

How we ran it

We used the same 40 searches as our AI Overview tracker study: ten how-to searches, ten product searches, eight local business searches, six brand searches and six news or entity searches, all with country set to us and device set to desktop. This was a second run of that list, this time keeping the source links. It cost 40 credits.

It is a small sample we picked ourselves, checked once. It shows what the sources looked like for these searches that day. It does not show how Google chooses sources in general, and a different list of searches would give different counts.

The overall picture

25 of the 40 searches had an AI Overview. Together they cited 187 pages from 107 different domains, an average of 7.5 sources per overview, ranging from 1 to 13. Here are the domains cited most often:

Three things stand out:

• YouTube was in a majority of overviews. 15 of 25, and 47 of the 187 citations, which is a quarter of everything cited. Because several videos can be cited in one overview, one overview cited YouTube more than once.
• After YouTube, the counts drop off a cliff. The next most frequent domain, Reddit, appeared in 5 overviews with one citation in each. Nobody else appeared in more than 3.
• The tail is long. Of the 107 domains, 89 were cited exactly once. The five most-cited domains together account for 36% of all citations, and the other 64% is spread across the remaining 102 domains.

It depends on the kind of search

Counts by group of search, for the overviews in each:

YouTube was cited in 14 of the 19 how-to and product overviews, and in one of the six brand and news overviews. For brand searches, the sources were Wikipedia and, in some cases, the brands’ own sites. For news and entity searches they were finance sites, such as Yahoo Finance and CNBC.

A few absences are as telling as the leaders. Quora was not cited in any of the 25 overviews. Neither was Investopedia, even for what is inflation, where the sources included YouTube and Wikipedia. NerdWallet appeared once, for best credit card.

Fifteen of the 40 searches had no overview at all in this run. That included all eight local business searches, which is the same pattern our first run showed.

The overview itself moves

We ran the same 40 searches twice. Both runs produced 25 overviews, but they were not the same 25: cheap flights to london had an overview the first time and none the second, and tesla had none the first time and one the second. Earlier, when we checked eight searches twice a minute apart, four overviews were word for word identical and four were different text with different sources.

So read a single count as a sample. A tally from one day tells you which domains showed up that day. To see a pattern, run the same searches on a schedule and compare weeks.

What this suggests, and what it does not

The data is consistent with video and discussion sites being cited far more often than most publishers. In our sample, a how-to or product search was likelier to cite a YouTube video than any individual publisher. If you publish guides, it suggests asking whether you have a video for the questions you want to be cited for.

It does not show that videos cause citations, that this holds beyond our 40 searches, or that being cited brings visits. We did not measure traffic. Treat the numbers as a prompt to check your own searches, which is quick to do.

The code

The response’s ai_overview field is null when there is no overview, and otherwise holds text and sources, each with a title and link. Counting citations by domain takes a few lines:

from collections import Counter
from urllib.parse import urlparse


def domain(link):
    return (urlparse(link).hostname or "").removeprefix("www.")


def tally(results):
    """Count, across searches, how many AI Overviews cite each domain and how many citations it gets."""
    overviews = [r["ai_overview"] for r in results if r["ai_overview"]]
    cited_in, citations = Counter(), Counter()
    for aio in overviews:
        domains = [domain(s["link"]) for s in aio["sources"]]
        citations.update(domains)
        cited_in.update(set(domains))
    return len(overviews), cited_in, citations

Each element of results is the result object of one google-search response. A function that fetches one is in Get Google search results as JSON with Python. Run it over your own list of searches:

n, cited_in, citations = tally(results)
print(n, "overviews |", sum(citations.values()), "citations |", len(citations), "domains")
for d, c in cited_in.most_common(6):
    print(f"  {d}: in {c} overviews, {citations[d]} citations")

On our data it printed:

25 overviews | 187 citations | 107 domains
  youtube.com: in 15 overviews, 47 citations
  reddit.com: in 5 overviews, 5 citations
  en.wikipedia.org: in 3 overviews, 3 citations
  cnet.com: in 3 overviews, 3 citations
  pcmag.com: in 3 overviews, 3 citations
  amazon.com: in 3 overviews, 3 citations

To see whether one specific domain of yours is cited, and how that changes over time, use the checker and the SQLite history in AI Overview tracker. It records whether an overview showed, whether it cited you and the citation rate over the last N checks.

What it costs

Every search is 1 credit, on every queue and device. Starter is $1.00 per 1,000 requests and the largest pack is $0.30 per 1,000, see pricing.

Failed requests are not charged.

Next steps

You now have counts of which sources 25 AI Overviews cited, a reason to read any single count as a sample, and a tally function for your own searches. Our free AI Overview checker shows one overview and its sources without an account. The Google Search API page lists every parameter with a full example response.