In June 2026, we analyzed 78 Google AI Overviewsacross SEO & marketing queries — and 22.4% of citations went to forums and UGC, not SEO tools.
YouTube and Reddit were cited more often than every SEO software brand combined. This is the SEO Magics AI Overview Citation Index — a free, recurring measurement of which domains Google's AI answers actually trust. This is the first edition, built on a focused sample of 78 queries — the dataset grows every month.
The leaderboard: who Google AI Overviews cite
Top 20 most-cited domains across 69AI Overviews. Share is each domain's portion of all 825 citations we recorded.
| # | Domain | Citations | Share | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 107 | 13% | Forums & user-generated |
| 2 | reddit.com | 57 | 6.9% | Forums & user-generated |
| 3 | semrush.com | 21 | 2.5% | SEO software & brands |
| 4 | onelittleweb.com | 8 | 1% | Other / independent |
| 5 | ahrefs.com | 8 | 1% | SEO software & brands |
| 6 | linkedin.com | 8 | 1% | Forums & user-generated |
| 7 | geeksforgeeks.org | 7 | 0.8% | Education & how-to |
| 8 | surferseo.com | 7 | 0.8% | SEO software & brands |
| 9 | developers.google.com | 7 | 0.8% | Official docs & reference |
| 10 | searchengineland.com | 6 | 0.7% | News & trade press |
| 11 | seo.com | 6 | 0.7% | Other / independent |
| 12 | searchenginejournal.com | 6 | 0.7% | News & trade press |
| 13 | searchatlas.com | 6 | 0.7% | Other / independent |
| 14 | seoprofy.com | 6 | 0.7% | Other / independent |
| 15 | agencyanalytics.com | 5 | 0.6% | Other / independent |
| 16 | neilpatel.com | 5 | 0.6% | SEO software & brands |
| 17 | digitalmarketinginstitute.com | 5 | 0.6% | Other / independent |
| 18 | moz.com | 5 | 0.6% | SEO software & brands |
| 19 | digitalapplied.com | 5 | 0.6% | Other / independent |
| 20 | quora.com | 4 | 0.5% | Forums & user-generated |
Citation share by source type
% of all 825 citations
How concentrated are AI citations?
cumulative share held by the top N domains
69 of 78 queries surfaced an AI Overview at an average of 12 citations each.
Key findings
Across 78 SEO and marketing queries, Google showed an AI Overview 88.5% of the time — AI answers are now the default, not the exception.
Forums and user-generated content account for 22.4% of every citation — more than every dedicated SEO software brand combined (8.7%).
youtube.com alone was cited 107 times across 42 of 69 AI Overviews (13% of all citations) — the single most-cited domain in SEO AI answers.
reddit.com ranked #2 with 6.9% of citations, appearing in 35 AI Overviews — proving AI leans on community discussion, not just authority sites.
Citations were spread across 459 unique domains; even the top 10 domains together hold only 28.6% of all citations — the long tail of AI sources is wide and contestable.
A typical SEO-niche AI Overview cites 12 sources — so being one of those sources is a measurable, winnable position, not a lottery.
How we built this index
We queried 78 SEO and digital-marketing keywords through the SerpAPI Google Search API on a United States (en-US) locale, desktop. For every query we recorded whether Google rendered an AI Overview and, if so, every domain cited inside that AI Overview answer block.
A citation is one reference link Google attaches to its AI Overview. We counted 825 citations across 69 AI Overviews (459unique domains), then ranked domains by total citations and grouped them into source categories. Category labels are a manual mapping of clearly-identifiable domains; anything we could not confidently classify is counted as “Other / independent.”
Period: 2026-06. Source: SerpAPI Google Search (US locale, desktop). This is June 2026 — Edition #1 — a first edition built on a focused sample of 78 queries. We expand the keyword set every month, so treat these figures as a directional snapshot of one niche, not a census of all of search.
CITE AS“SEO Magics AI Overview Citation Index, June 2026.” Free to cite and reference with a link back to this page. Updated monthly at this permanent URL.
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