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Data study of 301025 AI answers: how often YouTube is cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok, month by month over 13 months.
YouTube is cited in 2.35% of measured answers over the last three months, which places it second of the platforms tracked. It is cited by 4 of the five models, most often by Gemini at 3.69% and least often by Claude at 0%.
YouTube is the clearest example of a platform that carries some models and is close to absent on others.
A citation rate of 2% means the source was cited twice for every 100 measured answers. Rates are computed per model against the number of answers of that model, so a model with a smaller sample never distorts a column. A source cited several times inside one answer is counted once per company block, which keeps a single verbose answer from dominating a month.
The gap between the model that cites YouTube most and the one that cites it least is 3.69 points. That spread, not the average, is what should decide a budget: the same work returns most on Gemini and least on Claude. Across all tracked platforms, YouTube ranks second.
Over the 13 months measured, YouTube moved from 1.76% in August 2025 to 0.58% in August 2026, with a peak of 8.15% in October 2025. Averaged over the first three months against the last three, the movement is minus 2.99 points.
The gap between the best and the worst model on YouTube is the widest of any platform measured, and it turns a video programme into a bet on a specific assistant. Video pays on the models that retrieve multimedia results, and returns almost nothing on the model with the largest user base. That does not make video worthless, it makes it a channel to be justified by audience rather than by an average citation rate.
Every number on this page comes from the public Sorank dataset. The underlying figures, the monthly detail and the filters are available here:
Open the source data on data.sorank.com
Data updated on 2026-08-26.
This study is free to quote, in an article, a deck or a report. Please cite the source and the measurement period, because the numbers move every month.
Sorank (2026). YouTube AI Citation Study: Does YouTube Get You Cited by the AIs. Sorank GEO studies, measured on 301025 AI answers collected between August 2025 and August 2026. Available at https://www.sorank.com/data/youtube-ai-citation-study
The same panel, read from another angle:
This study describes a market. Sorank measures your site: which questions mention you, which mention someone else, and what to publish to change that, tracked weekly across the same five AI.
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YouTube is cited by 4 of the five models measured. Gemini cites it most, in 3.69% of its answers, and Claude least, in 0%. The full model by model breakdown is on this page.
On 301025 answers from five AI, collected between August 2025 and August 2026, with every cited source extracted and normalised. The citation rate is the number of citations per 100 measured answers. The public dataset is on data.sorank.com.
Not necessarily. Video still earns direct views and search visibility. The point of this study is narrower: do not count on YouTube for AI citations if your buyers use a model that measures close to zero for it.
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