YouTube citations rose in Google AI Overviews (AIO) by more than 300% since the beginning of August and 200% since September, according to data released Thursday.

Ecommerce-related YouTube citations have increased by 121% as the holiday season gets underway.

Jim Yu, founder of enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge, pointed to the ability for AI Overviews to summarize YouTube videos.

“Google’s AI will watch and listen to the video to summarize the content,” he said, suggesting that the AI technology caches content to make it easier and quicker to access.

“I think it’s integrated into AI Overviews and creates a bulleted list. It’s a natural part of the AI experience,” Yu added.

The growth in YouTube AI-related citations is significant for two reasons, according to the company’s report.

As a user-generated content platform, it provides businesses with an additional channel to leverage their community’s voice or directly build content that could function as a citation — and sourcing YouTube is a clear demonstration of Google Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.

Videos have been part of search results for years, but in these instances, texts such as descriptions or transcripts are used to rank the video.

BrightEdge has identified data in Gemini content, so the video can be cited to help generate an answer to a query.

Content in YouTube — the second-largest search engine — was cited as a source at least once in as much as 60% of the AI Overviews tracked by BrightEdge Generative Parser in September.

BrightEdge’s report pointed to video as becoming a dominant medium in AI-generated results.

Although ecommerce has not fully caught up, the rise in video content overall suggests brands need to prioritize optimizing video assets for YouTube to capitalize on the trend.

The data also identified volatility in shopping queries that fell from 37% in early August to 26% in late September.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, the data identified a trend where shopping-related queries have stabilized.

Yu also shared overall trends around shopping and ecommerce in Google Search. “Don’t over depend on AI Overviews,” he said. “It’s important to keep optimizing for traditional search content.”

As AI Overview and Gemini become increases in multimodal, it will become more important to have and optimize different types of content, he said.

BrightEdge also shared data on SearchGPT’s growth rate of 150% month-over-month.
It also now sends brands 4x more referrals than Perplexity and Claude, which grew 22% in the same month.

YouTube AI-related citations have surpassed growth expectations. As a user-generated content platform, it provides businesses with an additional channel to leverage their community’s voice or directly build content that could function as a clickable citation.