YouTube is the video domain. Its September 2026 US mention share, one vendor, runs from 22.9% of the AI Overview top-source pool to 1.9% on Copilot. TikTok is a real and smaller row on the two Google Search surfaces. Instagram is not counted here as video. A 73% figure is how timestamped YouTube citations split between AI Overviews and AI Mode, not YouTube's share of anything.
- YouTube is first on US AI Overviews at 22.9% of the top-source pool, and second on AI Mode, Perplexity, and the Gemini app.
- YouTube is eighth on ChatGPT at 2.5%, with 114,596 pages, and eleventh on Copilot at 1.9%. A video plan copied from Overviews will overshoot those two engines.
- TikTok is 3.3% on AI Overviews and 2.7% on AI Mode, eighth and ninth. It is not in the ChatGPT or Copilot top tens.
- June was a different Perplexity. A republished Ahrefs table had YouTube at 32.4% of the top-source sum, ahead of Reddit. By 2 September they had swapped.
- Otterly recorded YouTube's share of AI Mode citation slots falling from 13.5% on 1 September to 3.9% on 20 September. The Ahrefs bars are dated 2 September. They are not the end of the month.
YouTube, one vendor, one month
The point of this page is a comparable row. Ahrefs' mention share is a share of each engine's top sources. It inflates every percentage. It is also the only definition applied to all six products in the same month. Partial
| Engine | YouTube mention share | Rank | Pages cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews | 22.9% | 1 | 1,737,252 |
| Perplexity | 20.8% | 2 | 1,059,603 |
| AI Mode | 17.8% | 2 | 1,553,020 |
| Gemini app | 14.6% | 2 | 187,970 |
| ChatGPT | 2.5% | 8 | 114,596 |
| Copilot | 1.9% | 11 | 149,378 |
Profound's older share of all citations makes the same split at a smaller scale. Through June 2025, YouTube was 2.0% of all Perplexity citations and second, and 1.9% of all AI Overview citations. It was not in ChatGPT's top ten. The level changed. The shape, heavy on Google's Search surfaces and on Perplexity, light on ChatGPT, is the part that has lasted.
Country flips the lead. Ahrefs Japan, cumulative to 31 March 2026, had YouTube first on Perplexity by citation count. A late-September Japan release said YouTube had left Perplexity's top ten and ChatGPT's. Spain, 22 October 2025, had YouTube first on Perplexity by response count, ahead of Spanish Wikipedia, Reddit, and TikTok. Sorank's French-heavy panel also had YouTube ahead of Reddit. The US chart is not an export.
When YouTube is cited, it is usually a video rather than a channel. Profound, US English ChatGPT, October to December 2025: when YouTube was cited it was a specific video 85% of the time. YouTube itself was 0.99% of all citations in that social cut. The page-level version of that sentence is on most-cited pages.
TikTok, where it was measured
TikTok clears the September US head on the two Search surfaces and not as a peer of YouTube. AI Overviews: 3.3%, rank 8, 140,750 pages. AI Mode: 2.7%, rank 9, 144,505 pages. It is not in the published ChatGPT top ten, the Copilot top ten, or the Gemini app top ten. Spain's October 2025 Perplexity response counts put TikTok fourth, at 48,662 responses, behind YouTube, Spanish Wikipedia, and Reddit. That is a count of responses, not a share, and it is one market.
Instagram ranks above TikTok on both Google surfaces. It is left out of this video list because the studies do not say the cited URL was a video. Treating every Meta domain as video would invent a category.
The 73% figure
Pepper, 23 September 2026, citing Otterly on more than 100 million citation instances across six platforms in a 30-day window. Two sentences get fused in recaps, and they are different.
First, the distribution of YouTube citations across engines: Perplexity 38.7%, AI Overviews 36.6%, AI Mode 19.6%. Those three sum to about 95%. This is where YouTube's citations went, not YouTube's share of each engine. An engine that cites YouTube rarely can still be absent from this split.
Second, timestamps. When a YouTube citation carries a timestamp, it appears on AI Overviews 73% of the time and on AI Mode 27% of the time. 73 plus 27 is 100. No timestamped YouTube citations were observed on ChatGPT, the Gemini app, Copilot, or Perplexity. Separately, about 31% of cited videos carried timestamp signals. A conflicting secondary phrasing says timestamped videos are "reused 78% more often." That is not the sentence Pepper uses, which is that 78% of timestamped videos were cited more than once. Otterly's original was not opened, so both the 73/27 split and the 31% are one step removed. Partial
What this does not prove
It does not prove that most how-to AI Overviews cite YouTube. A check of about 1,777 how-to overviews was not found. Rank Prompt's finding that only 12.9% of cited videos were in YouTube's own top ten is about which videos, and its Google bucket merges AI Mode with Overviews. Digiday's report that YouTube was the most-cited platform across eight products in August 2026, via Meltwater, names no absolute shares.
Hypothesis A YouTube citation in Claude or Gemini can be a recommended video rather than evidence the model used the video to write the answer. Digiday attributes that caution to Weglot. It was not re-tested here.
How to use the list
Commission the video for the surfaces where YouTube is in the top two, and check a panel dated after 15 September before you treat AI Mode's 17.8% as current. For ChatGPT and Copilot, a video is a supporting asset. It is not the citation the September tables say those engines reach for. The full Overview list is here, and the AI Mode list, including the google.com problem, is here.
YouTube is 22.9% of the US AI Overview top-source pool and 2.5% of ChatGPT's. Same vendor, same month, same definition.
Share on XVerification status
The comparison table uses only Ahrefs' September 2026 mention share, so the rows share a denominator. Timestamp claims are attributed to a secondary summary because Otterly's page was not opened. The 1,777 how-to figure was searched and not found. No blended "YouTube is 20% of AI search" number is stated.
Namdev, R. (2026). Most-cited video domains in AI search (v1). Retrieved from https://ritiknamdev.com/blog/most-cited-video-domains-ai-search Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution.
The Overview and AI Mode pages carry the full lists. This page is only the video rows.