We pulled every AI Overviews citation from Surfer AI Search Analytics between September 1 and 28, 2026, so that you know which sources are most likely to earn you a mention.
What did the whopping 6.78 million citations reveal? For example: YouTube alone earned more AI Overviews citations than Reddit and Google.com combined. And Google-owned domains took 47.0% of all citations that went to the top 50 sites.
But let's dig deeper.
The 50 most-cited domains in AI Overviews
Here's the full list of the most cited domains in AI Overviews, based on a dataset from all Surfer users.
You can see the domains that earned the most citations, their share of the top 50 cited domains, and their share of all the domains we counted.
Data: Surfer AI Search Analytics, September 1 to 28, 2026. "% of all AIO citations" is the domain's share of 6.78 million AI Overviews citations. "% of top-50 citations" is its share of the 1,424,088 citations that went to these 50 domains.
Let's sum up what the table shows.
- The top 3 take almost two-thirds. YouTube, Reddit, and Google.com earn 63.5% of top-50 citations. YouTube's 453,639 citations beat Reddit (251,875) and Google.com (199,254) combined.
- Google-owned domains take 47.0%. That's YouTube, google.com, Google Play (#12), and Google Translate (#38). And if you consider that Reddit also has a deal with Google, it’s clear that Google favors its own.
- Social and community platforms take another 32.9%. Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Instagram, Medium, and TikTok. Five of the top 10 domains are social sites.
- The top 50 are only 21.0% of the picture. The other 79.0% of AI Overviews citations go to domains outside this list. In your niche, they may be the ones that come out on top.
How did we collect the data?
Between September 1 and 28, 2026, we tracked 1,206,374 LLM responses across 57,595 prompts for AI Overviews. That added up to 6.78 million citations.
We scrape what real users see in the interface, not API responses. Check out our data study on LLM response scraping vs. using an API to collect data to see why it matters.
A few more notes on how to look at the numbers:
- "% of all AIO citations" is each domain's share of every AI Overviews citation in our data.
- "% of top-50 citations" is each domain's share of the 1,424,088 citations that went to the 50 domains in the table.
- Subdomains count separately. play.google.com, translate.google.com, and m.yelp.com each have their own row, so a brand's full footprint can be bigger than a single row shows.
What this all means for you (and your social media team)
The data is clear on two things: Google likes to cite Google, and it’s worth investing in social media platforms. Still, not all citations come from the huge domains, so don't forget to always check for your own use case.
Google cites its own properties first, so get serious about your SEO
Google itself places third on the top cited domains list.
And according to our AI Overviews research, 80% of citations went to pages ranking in Google's top 3. Plus, AIO cites just 3 to 4 sources per query on average.
That should be enough of an incentive not to overlook your SERP rankings and neglect your top-ranking pages, even if LLMs are your main traffic source right now.
Secondly, if your brand isn’t on YouTube, you're likely missing out. A video that answers the same question as your article gives you a second chance at the same AI Overviews. Give it a title that matches the question, and answer it early in the video and the description. Worth a shot!
Reddit's going strong
Reddit earned 251,875 citations, or 17.7% of the top 50.
That's no accident. In February 2024, Google signed a deal with Reddit reportedly worth about $60 million a year. It gives Google access to Reddit's content to train its AI models and improve Search. As of September 2026, the deal runs until 2027.
Reddit marketing can be a huge challenge with uncertain outcomes, but if you have a community specialist who can spare it some time, it sure won’t hurt.
Get your socials in check
Facebook is #4 on the list with 87,141 citations. LinkedIn is #5, Quora is #6, and Instagram is #7. TikTok shows up at #26.
Together with Reddit and Medium, social and community platforms take 32.9% of the top 50's citations.
So, forward this article to your social media team. Then make sure the posts meet AI Overviews’ standards: answer a real question in the first line instead of burying it under a hook. Put the key info in the text or caption, since that's the part a search engine can read for sure.
Last but very much NOT least: check which sites earn citations for your top prompts
Remember that 79.0% of citations go to domains outside the top 50?
For your prompt, getting a mention in a different source altogether may be a better bet than appearing in any of the domains listed above (and easier to pull off than spending long hours coming up with non-marketingy Reddit replies only to get shot down by mods).
Plus, don’t ignore posting on your own site. The list still shows domains that aren’t Google-owned, social media sites, or well-known review portals and content aggregators—for example, Zapier, Semrush, Figma, Guideflow. If it happened for them, it can happen for you.
Find the most-cited sources for your prompts
The table above is a useful benchmark. But it's an average across tens of thousands of prompts. And to really nail your top prompts, you don’t want to go by average.
The top 50 domains only account for 21.0% of AI Overviews citations. The other 79.0% is spread across thousands of smaller sites. Some of them are probably the exact niche sources shaping answers in your category.
So before you spend a quarter building a YouTube channel or chasing Reddit threads, check which sources actually show up for your prompts.
You can start by hand:
- Search your 10 most important buyer questions in Google.
- Note which domains the AI Overviews cites.
- Repeat it a few times over a week, since AI Overviews change from day to day.
- Look for the domains that keep coming back.
But if you want to do that across all your top prompts, track trends, and react to changes fast, that’s not a sustainable approach. Use Surfer AI Search Analytics instead.
Add the prompts you care about, then open the Sources dashboard. It shows every domain and URL cited for your prompts.
Use the AI models filter to view AI Overviews only, or switch to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or AI Mode to see how different their favorite sources are. Toggle Group by domain to get a list just like the one in this article, but built from your prompts.
And the Mentioned column shows whether each source already mentions your brand. The ones that don't are your outreach list.
Want to see which domains AI Overviews cite for your prompts? Try Surfer AI Search Analytics free for 7 days.
