YouTube Just Overtook Reddit as the Top Social Source for AI Citations
Analysis of 6.1M citations shows YouTube doubled its share while Reddit fell. Here's what the shift means and how to optimize video for AI visibility.
YouTube Just Overtook Reddit as the Top Social Source for AI Citations
For most of 2025, Reddit was the dominant social platform cited in AI-generated answers. If you asked ChatGPT or Perplexity a product question, odds were good that a Reddit thread would show up in the citations. Marketers noticed, and “Reddit strategy” became a hot GEO tactic.
That playbook just got flipped.
An analysis of 6.1 million citations by Goodie AI across 10 AI platforms found that YouTube’s share of social citations doubled from 18.9% in August 2025 to 39.2% by December. In the same period, Reddit’s share dropped from 44.2% to 20.3%. Separate data from Bluefish, reported by Adweek, confirms the trend: YouTube now appears in roughly 16% of all LLM answers, compared to 10% for Reddit.
This isn’t a minor fluctuation. It’s a structural shift in how AI platforms discover and cite information. And most brand teams haven’t adjusted.
The Numbers Behind the Reversal
The Goodie AI study tracked citations across 66 brands in consumer products, gaming, healthcare, fintech, and pharma. Here’s how the social citation landscape changed month by month:
| Month | YouTube | X (Twitter) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2025 | 18.9% | 44.2% | 0.0% | 12.2% |
| Sep 2025 | 28.8% | 41.7% | 0.1% | 19.6% |
| Oct 2025 | 32.4% | 15.9% | 29.9% | 18.0% |
| Nov 2025 | 35.9% | 19.3% | 28.4% | 11.3% |
| Dec 2025 | 39.2% | 20.3% | 23.5% | 11.6% |
Two things jump out.
First, the rise of X. Its citation share went from essentially zero to nearly 30% in two months, driven almost entirely by Grok (which cites X posts with 99.75% exclusivity). More on platform coupling below.
Second, Reddit’s drop was sharpest in October, which coincides with Perplexity’s legal dispute with Reddit over content licensing. Pre-lawsuit, Reddit held a 19.5% share of Perplexity’s social citations. Post-lawsuit, it fell to 2.67%, an 86% drop. YouTube absorbed most of that gap, jumping from 52% to over 95% of Perplexity’s social citations.
Here’s the important nuance: Reddit’s absolute citation volume actually grew in November and December. It didn’t collapse. YouTube and X simply grew so much faster that they compressed Reddit’s relative share. Reddit got outgrown, not displaced.
Why AI Systems Are Gravitating Toward Video
The shift isn’t random. It reflects real technical advantages that video content, specifically YouTube, has for AI retrieval systems.
Transcripts are structured text. YouTube auto-generates transcripts for every video, and creators can upload corrected versions. These transcripts give AI models clean, indexable text organized into timestamped segments. As Justin Inman, CEO of Emberos, told Adweek: “YouTube offers clean, long-form, indexable transcripts, while Reddit content is fragmented across threads and comments.”
High information density. A 15-minute explainer video often packs more structured information than a dozen Reddit comments. AI models can extract specific claims, compare product features, and pull quotes from a single source rather than synthesizing fragments across a thread.
Google’s retrieval stack favors YouTube. This one matters a lot. The Goodie AI data shows that 82.47% of YouTube’s AI citations come from Google-owned surfaces (AI Overviews and Gemini). YouTube is deeply integrated into Google’s retrieval pipeline. When Google’s AI needs a how-to explanation or product comparison, YouTube is the first place it looks.
Multi-modal signals. AI models are getting better at processing video directly. Gemini 3 processes video at roughly 300 tokens per second, sampling one frame per second. It can read on-screen text, interpret visual demonstrations, and cross-reference audio narration with visual content. This means brands that create clear, well-produced video are feeding AI systems information in the format they’re increasingly built to consume.
Platform Coupling: Each AI Has Its Preferred Social Source
One of the most striking findings from the Goodie AI study is how tightly certain AI platforms are coupled to specific social sources:
| AI Platform | Top Social Source | Exclusivity Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Grok | X (Twitter) | 99.75% |
| Google AI Overviews | YouTube | 82.47% |
| Gemini | YouTube | 63.7% |
| Perplexity | YouTube (post-lawsuit) | 95.25% |
This coupling has serious strategic implications. If your brand’s AI visibility strategy focuses only on Reddit threads, you’re largely invisible to Google’s AI surfaces, which represent the biggest audience. Google AI Overviews alone reach over 100 million users in the US and India.
The takeaway isn’t that Reddit doesn’t matter. It’s that a single-platform social strategy leaves gaps in your AI citation coverage. Each AI system has its own content preferences shaped by technical integrations, business partnerships, and licensing agreements.
We covered the broader differences between AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity in a previous analysis. The platform coupling data adds another layer: your social presence strategy needs to match the platforms your target AI surfaces actually pull from.
What This Means for Your Content Strategy
The YouTube citation surge doesn’t mean you need to become a YouTuber. But it does mean video needs to be part of your AI visibility playbook, particularly if Google’s AI surfaces matter to you.
1. Create Explainer and Comparison Videos
AI models cite YouTube most often for how-to content, product comparisons, and troubleshooting guides. According to Profound’s data, YouTube generates roughly 18x more AI citations than Instagram and 50x more than TikTok. The types of video that get cited aren’t flashy brand content; they’re informational videos that answer specific questions.
If your brand produces comparison guides or detailed feature breakdowns in written form, consider creating video versions. The written content becomes the transcript; the video becomes an additional citation surface.
2. Optimize Transcripts as a First-Class Asset
AI models can’t watch your video the way a human does. They read the transcript. Treat it accordingly:
- Upload custom transcripts rather than relying on auto-generation. Auto-captions mangle brand names, technical terms, and product names.
- Front-load key information. State what the video covers, including your brand name, within the first 30 seconds.
- Use clear, descriptive language. Avoid vague phrases like “this thing” or “as I mentioned.” AI needs explicit references.
As Search Engine Land reports, transcripts, titles, and descriptions are the three strongest levers for YouTube AI visibility, and they’re all fully within your control.
3. Implement VideoObject Schema
When embedding YouTube videos on your website, use VideoObject structured data. This tells AI crawlers exactly what each video contains. Key properties to include:
hasPartfor chapter definitions (enables “Seek-to-Action” in search)transcriptfor the full text (ensures 100% accuracy for brand names)interactionStatisticfor engagement metrics (signals authority)
Pages with 3+ schema types have a 13% higher likelihood of being cited by AI, according to the AirOps State of AI Search report. VideoObject adds one more schema type to your pages while giving AI systems structured access to your video content.
4. Build Topic Clusters, Not One-Off Videos
AI systems favor brands that demonstrate consistent topical authority. Rather than publishing one video about your product, create a series that covers related aspects. This mirrors the content hub strategy that works for written content, but applied to video.
A B2B software company, for example, might build a series covering: what the product does, how it compares to alternatives, common implementation challenges, and customer use cases. Each video reinforces the others, and AI models begin associating your brand with the topic.
5. Don’t Abandon Reddit (But Expand)
Reddit still matters, especially for ChatGPT. The off-site presence strategies we’ve covered before remain valid. But the data is clear that a Reddit-only approach leaves most of your AI citation potential on the table.
Social citations overall are growing fast. Total social citation volume nearly tripled between September and December 2025, according to the Goodie AI data. This rising tide benefits brands that show up across multiple platforms, not just the one that happened to be on top six months ago.
The Bigger Picture: Social Citations Are Still Small (For Now)
One important caveat from Alex Sherman, CEO of Bluefish: “Social content still represents a small share of total LLM citations, 7%, which tells us AI isn’t defaulting to social media. It’s pulling from it only when the content adds real explanatory value.”
Seven percent might sound small, but that number is growing rapidly and unevenly. For product categories where how-to content and user reviews drive purchase decisions, social citations matter disproportionately. And as AI models improve at processing video and multi-modal content, YouTube’s share will likely keep climbing.
Sherman also made a point that brand teams need to internalize: “AI visibility is earned differently than human attention. Views, followers and creator influence don’t reliably translate into AI influence.” A video with 500 views but a perfect transcript and clear product comparison can outperform a viral clip with millions of views in AI citation terms.
The brands that win AI citations in 2026 won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest YouTube channels. They’ll be the ones producing clear, structured, information-dense content that AI systems can parse, verify, and cite. That’s a different game than the attention economy most video strategies are built for.
RivalHound tracks your brand’s visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, and more. Start monitoring to see where you stand.