TL;DR
- 77.6% of 1,208 AI Overview citations on best X searches point to other ranked lists.
- OrganiKPI calls the pattern second-hand visibility.
- 159 of our 160 buyer queries triggered an AI Overview in September 2026.
- YouTube alone carries 22.6% of citations, more than any website.
- Vendors earn citations mostly by publishing their own category ranking.
Google shows an AI Overview on essentially every “best X” search now. We pulled 160 buyer queries in September 2026, from best CRM software to best air fryer, and 159 of them returned an AI Overview. What it cites is the interesting part: 77.6% of its 1,208 citations point to pages that are themselves ranked lists, YouTube carries more citations than any single website, and when a vendor gets cited, it is usually for the vendor’s own ranking of its own market. We call the pattern second-hand visibility: brands enter the answer box through rankings that already exist about their market, usually somebody else’s.
The numbers
Our analysis covers 160 commercial queries, 1,208 AI Overview citations, and one plain SERP. The only query that returned no AI Overview at all was best session recording software. One more, best video conferencing software, produced an AI Overview with zero citations. The remaining 158 averaged 7.65 citations each, with a median of 7.
Here is where those 1,208 citations point:
| Citation source | Citations | Share | Most cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| UGC platforms | 386 | 32.0% | YouTube (273), Reddit (91), Quora (10) |
| Vendors in the category | 276 | 22.8% | Zoho (4), Zendesk, Salesforce, Bill.com (3 each) |
| Review platforms and editorial | 274 | 22.7% | G2 (30), Forbes (29), PCMag (27), Gartner (12) |
| Blogs and roundup sites | 229 | 19.0% | Zapier (38), Medium (4) |
| Other | 43 | 3.5% | Google Shopping (31), Wikipedia (2) |
Three more numbers frame everything below. 77.6% of all cited URLs are themselves ranked lists, category roundups, or picks pages. 72.2% of the queries cite at least one vendor that sells in the category being searched. And only 53.6% of cited domains also appear in the same query’s top 10 organic results, which means almost half the sources come from somewhere else entirely.
What we measured
We built a list of 160 “best X” queries across four segments: 60 B2B software categories, 30 developer tool categories, 40 consumer products, and 30 services. Desktop SERPs for the United States were pulled with DataForSEO’s SERP API on September 1, 2026, with AI Overview loading and expansion enabled. Every cited domain was classified into one of five groups: vendors that sell in the queried category, independent blogs and roundup sites, review platforms and editorial publications, UGC platforms, and everything else. Software company blogs ranking categories they do not sell in, like Zapier’s CRM roundups, count as blogs rather than vendors.
AI Overviews are near-universal on buyer queries
A 99.4% trigger rate on commercial queries looks nothing like the published baselines. Ahrefs’ study of 146 million SERPs from September 2025 found AI Overviews on 20.5% of all keywords, and on just 4.3% of keywords classified as commercial intent. A year later, our hand-picked buyer queries triggered one 159 times out of 160.
Part of the gap is classification. “Best X” queries sit in a strange place: the searcher intends to buy, but the question is phrased as a request for information, and Ahrefs found that 99.9% of AIO-triggering keywords carry informational intent. Their comparison-query classifier, the closest match to our set, showed a 26.2% trigger rate. Nothing in the published data predicts 99.4%. The practical reading: whatever intent label your keyword tool assigns, if the query starts with “best”, Google now answers it with an AI Overview before the searcher sees a single organic result. The click-through damage that AI Overviews cause applies to your money keywords, and opting out does not remove the answer box, it removes you from it.
Three quarters of citations are other people’s rankings
937 of the 1,208 cited URLs, 77.6%, are pages whose URL or title marks them as a ranked list, a “top N” roundup, a picks page, or a category listing. When Google assembles an answer to “best X”, it does not synthesize a ranking from product pages. It quotes rankings that already exist: PCMag’s picks, Zapier’s roundups, G2’s category pages, a YouTube comparison video.
This is the commercial-query version of a pattern we found in our analysis of 42,971 AI citations: comparison and listicle formats get cited far beyond their share of the web. For “best X” queries the effect is close to total. A product page describes one option. A ranking answers the question. Google cites the thing that answers the question, which is the same reason featured snippets favored list formats for a decade.
YouTube is the single largest source
YouTube alone accounts for 273 citations, 22.6% of the total, and appears in 73.4% of the AI Overviews in our set. Reddit adds 91 citations and appears in 45.6% of them. No website comes close: the most cited domain that is not a UGC platform, Zapier, sits at 38.
We measured YouTube, Reddit, and Wikipedia dominance in AI citations before, and Ahrefs’ correlation work across 75,000 brands found YouTube mentions to be the strongest single predictor of AI visibility. What this dataset adds: on buyer queries specifically, a comparison video is the most cited single asset type in our data. If your category has no “best X” video worth citing, the AI Overview will cite someone else’s.
Vendors get cited for ranking themselves
Vendors in the queried category earned 276 citations, but only 98 of those point to a product page or homepage. The other 178, 64.5% of all vendor citations, point to content the vendor published about its own market, and most of it is the vendor’s own “best X in our category” ranking. Bill.com is cited three times on best expense management software. Retell AI is cited on best AI voice agents for its own list of the best voice AI providers. Amplemarket, SalesCaptain, and 1mind are all cited on best AI SDR tools for their own roundups of AI SDR tools.
Whatever you think of the incentives, the mechanism is now measurable: Google’s AI Overview treats a vendor’s self-ranking as a citable source for the category question. The vendors winning citations wrote the ranked list their buyers were going to search for. This is the strongest argument we have seen for the comparison-content half of a GEO program, and it stacks with what our cross-engine recommendation study found: every engine assembles its shortlist from whatever comparison content it can retrieve.
Consumer queries go to editorial reviews and Google Shopping
The citation mix shifts hard by segment. On B2B software queries, vendors take 29% of citations and UGC 31%. On developer tools, UGC alone takes 39% and editorial nearly vanishes at 8%. On consumer products the order inverts: editorial and review publications take 35%, UGC 31%, and vendors collapse to 9%. Wirecutter, RTINGS, Serious Eats, and their peers still own the consumer answer box.
Consumer hardware queries also produced the strangest result in the dataset: 31 citations pointing to Google Shopping product links, on queries like best gaming laptop, best standing desk, and best air fryer. Google is citing its own shopping surface inside its own AI answer. No B2B query in our set drew a single one.
Almost half the citations come from outside the top 10
53.6% of cited domains also rank in the same query’s top 10 organic results. The other 46.4% do not. That is domain-level overlap, which is generous: a domain counts as overlapping even when the AI Overview cites a different page than the one ranking.
This matches the direction of Ahrefs’ finding that only 38% of AI Overview citations come from top 10 pages, down from 76% in mid-2025. Ranking still helps, and position bias inside cited pages still applies, but the answer box is no longer a summary of page one. Google fans out to sub-queries and pulls citations from SERPs you never see, which is why our AI Overviews optimization playbook treats topic clusters as the unit of work rather than single pages.
What this changes if you sell something
Visibility on buyer queries is second-hand, so the asset that earns a citation is a ranking, yours or someone else’s.
- Publish the ranked list for your own category. 64.5% of vendor citations in our data point to exactly that page. Rank honestly and put real evidence in it, because the page competes with G2 and PCMag for the same citation slot.
- Get into a comparison video. YouTube is 22.6% of all citations on buyer queries. A hands-on “best X” video from a creator, or your own, is more citable than your pricing page will ever be.
- Work the review platforms. G2, Forbes, PCMag, and Gartner together account for 98 citations in our set. Your presence there is an input to AI answers.
- Track the answer box as well as rankings. Your share of voice on “best X” queries is decided inside the AI Overview. The GEO tools that monitor citations will show you movement that rank trackers miss.
- Audit where you stand today. Our GEO audit checklist covers the citation-side checks in order.
Limits
This is one pull of 160 hand-picked queries on one day, from one location setting, on desktop. AI Overviews vary between pulls, so the trigger rate and citation mix carry sampling noise, and our query set skews toward software, which is where we work. Domain classification involved judgment calls on the long tail: out-of-category company blogs count as blogs, and four citations stayed unclassified. The Ahrefs comparison figures come from September 2025 data with their intent taxonomy, not ours, so the 4.3% versus 99.4% contrast measures a different sample a year apart, and some of that gap is methodology rather than growth. The direction of every finding survives these caveats; the second decimal place does not.
Where this leaves the answer box
On buyer queries, Google’s AI Overview is a meta-ranking: it reads the rankings the web already wrote, YouTube’s included, and quotes them back with citations. The organic top 10 supplies barely half of its sources. For anyone selling software, the citation path runs through ranked lists, comparison videos, and review platforms, and the vendors who publish credible category rankings are already collecting citations on the queries their buyers type. How this differs on Google’s AI Mode, which cites a different set of sources, is the follow-up worth watching.