The Most-Cited Sources in Google's AI Overviews (We Checked 24 Searches)

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Is My Brand in AI · Original research, June 10, 2026

TL;DR: We ran 24 buyer-style "best [category]" searches through Google's AI Overview and recorded every source it cited.

• Reddit was the most-cited site, appearing in 13 of the 21 AI Overviews that triggered (62%), and often as the top source.
• Brand-owned sites were rarely the citation. AI Overviews lean on third parties: forums and independent review media.
• The mix shifts by category: consumer queries favor Reddit, B2B software favors vendor blogs and PCMag, and finance favors authority sites only.

Everyone in marketing now repeats the same advice: "get cited by AI." Almost nobody shows you who actually gets cited. So instead of guessing, we measured it. We took 24 ordinary "best [category]" searches, ran each one through Google, opened the AI Overview, and wrote down every website it listed as a source. This page is the raw result and what it means for your brand.

One number frames the whole thing: of the 21 searches that produced an AI Overview, Reddit was cited in 13 of them. No brand's own website came close. If you have been pouring effort into your product pages and wondering why AI never mentions you, this is why. The citation almost never points at the seller. It points at the places people talk about the seller.

How we ran the test

We kept the method deliberately simple and reproducible, so you can repeat it yourself.

• Engine: Google AI Overview, the source panel it labels "N sites."
• Queries: 24 buyer-intent "best [category]" searches, spread on purpose across four very different areas so the finding would not be specific to one niche: business software (project management, CRM, email marketing, accounting, VPN, web hosting, password manager, AI writing, help desk, HR), consumer products (running shoes, office chair, robot vacuum, mattress, electric toothbrush, coffee maker), finance (high-yield savings, travel credit card, budgeting app), and lifestyle (protein powder, meal kits, standing desk, note-taking app, web conferencing).
• What we logged: for each search, every distinct domain in the AI Overview source panel, the total source count, and the type of site.
• When: a single snapshot on June 10, 2026, US English results.

The point of mixing protein powder with CRM software is coverage. If we only tested software, "Reddit dominates" might be a quirk of one industry. Seeing the same pattern hold from supplements to enterprise tools is what makes it a pattern.

Finding 1: Most "best" searches get an AI Overview, but not all

On the day we ran them, most of the 24 searches returned an AI Overview, and a few pure physical-retail product searches returned a Shopping grid with price and size filters instead of an AI answer. Which queries trigger an AI Overview is not fixed: when we re-checked the next day, a product search that had shown only Shopping was already showing an AI Overview. So treat this split as a snapshot, not a rule.

The practical read still holds. If you sell software, services, or finance products, an AI Overview is usually the first thing a buyer sees. If you sell a physical retail product, it is less predictable, and part of the battle is still in Shopping and traditional reviews. When an AI Overview did appear, it drew on about 7 sources (ranging from 5 to 12).

Finding 2: The most-cited sources

Counting how many of the 21 AI Overviews cited each site:

Rank	Source	AI Overviews citing it	What it is
1	Reddit	13 of 21	Community forum
2	Forbes	6	Review media (Advisor / Vetted)
3	YouTube	6	Video
4	PCMag	5	Tech review media
5	Zapier	4	Software review blog
6	NerdWallet	3	Finance review media

Below the top six sat a long tail of two-time and one-time sources: Bankrate, CNET, Amazon, Salesforce, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, Healthline, Serious Eats, HubSpot, Hostinger, Experian, and many niche blogs. The shape is clear. A small set of forums and big review brands appear again and again, and then a wide scatter of everyone else.

What is striking is who is missing from the top: the brands being searched for. When someone searches "best CRM," Google's AI did not build its answer from Salesforce's or HubSpot's homepage. It built it from Reddit threads, Forbes, and YouTube reviews, and only then name-checked the products.

Finding 3: Four types of source, and forums lead

Sort the citations by type and a structure appears:

• Forums and community posts (Reddit, plus a Clark Howard community thread): present in 14 of 21 AI Overviews. This is the single most common ingredient.
• Independent review media (Forbes, PCMag, CNET, NerdWallet, Bankrate, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, Serious Eats): the backbone. Nearly every AI Overview included at least one.
• Vendor and brand sites (Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Jasper, Slack, Hostinger): they do appear, but mostly in business-software answers, and almost never as the only source.
• Video (YouTube): about a third of answers.

The headline for a brand owner is uncomfortable but useful: the two source types that dominate are the two you do not own. You cannot publish your way to a forum consensus, and you cannot self-publish your way into a Forbes roundup. Both have to be earned.

Finding 4: The mix changes by category

Reddit is not everywhere. Where it shows up, and where it does not, follows a logic worth understanding before you copy anyone's "AI playbook."

• Consumer and general queries (project management, CRM, VPN, web hosting, password managers, coffee makers, note apps): Reddit is usually the top or near-top source, alongside big review media. These categories have huge public discussion, and the AI leans on it.
• B2B software niches (accounting, AI writing, help desk, web conferencing): Reddit was usually absent. With less open forum chatter, the AI fell back on vendor blogs plus PCMag-style roundups. Here, getting into the listicles and publishing genuinely useful vendor content matters more.
• Finance, especially credit cards: the AI cited only authoritative finance media (NerdWallet, Bankrate, Experian, Credit Karma, The Points Guy, CNN). No forum at all. The more a topic touches money or health, the more Google narrows to recognized authorities.
• Physical retail products: the least predictable. A pure-retail search may return a Shopping grid instead of an AI Overview, and whether it does shifts from day to day.

So "be on Reddit" is the right answer for a consumer app and the wrong first move for a credit-card issuer. Match the tactic to where your category's citations actually come from.

What this means for your brand

Pull the four findings together and the strategy writes itself.

1. Your own website is rarely the citation. Owned content alone will not put you in AI answers. It is necessary, not sufficient.
2. For consumer and general categories, Reddit is the highest-leverage surface. It is the most-cited domain on the open web for these answers. Genuine, non-spammy presence in the relevant subreddits is the closest thing to a cheat code, and we walk through this in how to improve brand visibility in AI search.
3. For everyone, earn third-party coverage. Getting included in the "best of" roundups that PCMag, Forbes, Zapier, and niche reviewers publish is the backbone of citations in every vertical.
4. Match the channel to your category. B2B software: vendor content plus roundups. Finance and health: build the kind of authority Google trusts. Consumer: forums and reviews.
5. You cannot manage what you do not measure. Before you act, check where your brand actually stands across engines. Our guide to tracking brand mentions shows a free way to do it by hand, and we are building a free AI visibility checker (early access) to do it in one click.

If you want the surface-by-surface version of this, see AI Overview optimization and how to get cited by ChatGPT. The principle is the same everywhere AI answers questions: it cites the sources it trusts, and you have to earn your way onto that list.

Honest limitations

This is a snapshot, not a law of physics, and we would rather tell you the caveats than oversell the number.

• It is a single engine (Google AI Overview), a single day (June 10, 2026), and a defined 24-query sample. A different day or account can return a different mix.
• AI Overviews are personalized and volatile. Run the same search on another day and both the sources and whether an AI Overview appears at all can change; we saw exactly that on a re-check. The aggregate pattern (Reddit and review media dominate) is far more stable than any single query.
• We identified most domains from the AI Overview source titles. A minority of long-tail sources were classified by type but not resolved to an exact domain. This does not move the most-cited ranking, which is driven by the sites that recurred across many searches.
• Searches were run in English with US settings. Results in other markets and languages will differ.

We plan to widen this: more queries, and the same test against Perplexity and ChatGPT, for a multi-engine follow-up. If you want that when it lands, the methodology above is the version anyone can reproduce in the meantime.

Method, query list, and per-search results were logged during collection. If you are a journalist or researcher and want the underlying notes, reach us through the contact page.