The short answer
AI Overviews in the AI services category cite YouTube and Reddit above everything else, then a long tail of very small sites. You cannot outrank the platforms, but you can be the small site that gets pulled in, and doing so depends more on answering one specific question cleanly than on domain authority.
What we did
On August 12, 2026 we pulled 77 live Google search results from a Minneapolis location with AI Overview content loaded: 56 commercial queries about AI services and 21 conversational, full-sentence questions. For each one we recorded whether an overview appeared, which domains it cited, what the organic results looked like, and what other features were present.
This is a snapshot of one category on one day, and search changes. Treat the patterns as directional and the specific numbers as dated.
What the results showed
The overview is nearly always there
Fifty of 56 commercial queries returned an AI Overview. Twenty-one of 21 conversational queries did. If you are working in a category like this one, planning content as though the overview is an occasional extra is planning for a results page that no longer exists.
People Also Ask is gone
Zero People Also Ask questions across all 77 results. For comparison, the same method applied to home service trades in the same project produced 318 of them. The overview has taken that slot in this category.
Platforms dominate the citations
| Cited source | Times cited across 77 results |
|---|---|
| youtube.com | 67 |
| reddit.com | 29 |
| linkedin.com | 16 |
| medium.com | 5 |
| ibm.com | 5 |
| salesforce.com | 5 |
| quora.com | 4 |
YouTube and Reddit are not competitors you displace. They are the substrate of this category's answers, because people discussing their real experience in public is exactly what a summarizer wants when the question is evaluative.
But the tail is full of tiny sites
Below the platforms, the cited domains were small: sites with a few hundred referring domains, and in several cases fewer than 150. One cited domain had an estimated 67 visits a month. Those are the slots that are actually available.
What the cited pages had in common
Reading the cited pages rather than just counting them, four traits recurred often enough to be worth acting on.
They answered one question, not a category
Cited pages tended to be narrow. A page about whether an AI receptionist is worth the cost got cited. A page titled with a service category did not. Breadth is a liability here, because a summarizer is resolving one question and a broad page dilutes its own relevance to any single one of them.
The answer came first
Cited passages were usually near the top of the page or immediately under a heading that matched the question. Very little that got quoted was buried in the middle of a long build-up.
They contained specifics a competitor could not copy
Numbers, named constraints, described processes, real conditions. Generic advice is infinitely substitutable and there is no reason to attribute it to anyone.
They included the negative case
Pages that said when something is a bad idea appeared more often than pages that only advocated. This makes sense mechanically. Many conversational queries are evaluative, and an evaluative answer needs material on both sides.
What to actually do about it
Start with the questions, not the keywords
Write down the twenty questions a buyer asks before hiring you, in their words, including the skeptical ones and the ones about price. Those are the units of work. One page or one clearly-headed section per question.
Check that your category even has overviews
Search several of your buyer questions and look. If overviews rarely appear in your category, this whole exercise is lower priority than ordinary local visibility work. Ours appeared on 50 of 56. Yours might not.
Fix your existing pages before adding new ones
Most sites already have pages that address the right questions and bury the answers. Moving the answer to the top of an existing page is faster and usually more effective than publishing a new one, and it does not add to what you have to maintain.
Do not neglect the platforms
If YouTube and Reddit are where two thirds of the citations go, a genuinely useful video answering a real customer question is not a side project. It is participation in the substrate the overview is built from. The same goes for answering honestly in communities where your buyers already are, without spamming them.
Measure by asking, not by analytics
Keep a fixed list of buyer questions. Run them on a schedule. Record who gets cited. That is the only reliable feedback loop, because assistants generally do not pass a referrer that shows up in your traffic reports.
What to reasonably expect
Being cited is not the same as being visited. Overviews answer many questions completely, and the person may never click. That is a genuine cost and it should factor into the decision.
What citation does provide is presence at the moment of evaluation, attribution by name, and inclusion in the comparison set. For a considered purchase, being named as a credible option inside the answer is worth something even when the click does not follow immediately.
Questions people ask about this
01How do I get my website cited in Google's AI Overview?+
Answer one specific buyer question per page or per clearly-headed section, put the answer in the first two sentences, include specific detail a competitor could not copy, and cover the negative case as well as the positive one. In our August 2026 study of 77 results, cited pages were consistently narrow and direct rather than broad and promotional.
02Do I need high domain authority to appear in an AI Overview?+
Less than you need to rank. We recorded citations of domains with 74 and 139 referring domains, and one with an estimated 67 visits a month. Authority helps but it is not the gate that it is for competitive rankings.
03Why do YouTube and Reddit dominate AI Overviews?+
Because many of these questions are evaluative, and people describing real experience in public is the most useful raw material for an evaluative answer. Across our 77 results, YouTube was cited 67 times and Reddit 29 times, far ahead of any business website.
04Are AI Overviews replacing People Also Ask?+
In some categories, apparently yes. Across all 77 AI-services results we read, Google surfaced zero People Also Ask questions, while the same research method applied to home service trades in the same project produced 318 of them.
05Will getting cited actually bring traffic?+
Not reliably. Overviews often answer the question completely, so citation buys presence and attribution at the evaluation moment rather than a guaranteed visit. It is worth doing for considered purchases and worth being honest about for businesses that need volume immediately.