AI search: why only 1% of Google's AI citations are blogs

A study of 300 typical small-business searches, published on September 10, 2026, found an AI Overview — the AI-generated summary Google places above the classic results — on 280 of those 300 queries: 93%. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, we confirm this every week in the visibility audits we run for clients. But the number that actually changes strategy isn’t coverage, which we already took for granted: it’s who gets cited inside those summaries, and the answer leaves corporate blogs almost entirely out.

The study: 280 of 300 searches already carry an AI summary

Marketing consultant Lilach Bullock tracked, live on US desktop, 300 small-business marketing and social-media queries. Coverage wasn’t uniform: 100% of Instagram-related questions returned an AI Overview, versus 77% for free-games queries. The overall average is still stark: 9 out of 10 searches of this type now surface an AI-generated answer before the link list. If your business wins clients through informational content — “how to choose X,” “what is Y,” comparisons — this is no longer a remote possibility. It’s the norm.

YouTube and Reddit split the citations; blogs, almost never

The most useful figure in the study isn’t how many searches show an AI answer — it’s which sources that AI cites when it answers. By a wide margin, YouTube is the most-cited source, appearing in 57% of the AI Overviews analyzed. Reddit comes second at 20%. Next come SEO tool sites (Semrush, Ahrefs) and Instagram or Quora pages. Independent blogs, including the study author’s own, show up in barely 1% of the summaries.

That doesn’t mean writing well on your site has stopped mattering — it’s still the foundation of any content strategy — but it does mean betting everything on the blog format to get cited by a generative engine is betting against the data. Google, and to a lesser extent ChatGPT or Gemini when they browse to answer, favor video and community content because those are formats where the model can easily verify who is saying what and with what social backing.

Even when you’re cited, the click still doesn’t arrive

We flagged back in August that AI Overviews cut organic CTR by up to 61%, per the Seer Interactive study covered by Search Engine Land. The September study adds the breakdown by position: with an AI Overview present, a page ranking in positions 4-6 gets just 0.7% CTR, and one in positions 7-10 only rises to 1.7%. Both are far below what those same positions earned before AI summaries. The practical takeaway hasn’t changed: ranking alone no longer works if you’re not cited — and now we know the format you’re competing with matters as much as the content itself.

What this means for a business that isn’t a media outlet

The natural reaction for a services company is to assume this is an editors-and-bloggers problem. It isn’t. If you depend on people reaching your site while researching before they buy, and that research increasingly resolves with a YouTube video or a Reddit thread cited by the AI instead of your article, the impact is direct: your acquisition funnel loses an entry point without your rankings dropping a single spot. Measuring position alone no longer tells the whole story; you need to measure which format is actually earning the citation.

What to do this week

1. Check what format is citing you today. Verify whether you appear in AI Overviews for your target queries, and what format is winning the citation when you don’t.
2. Don’t drop the blog, but stop treating it as your only GEO channel. A short video answering the same question as your article has, per this data, far better odds of being cited.
3. Treat Reddit and your industry’s forums as a visibility surface, not just a link-building tactic — showing up with useful, verifiable answers there now carries more weight than it did a year ago.
4. Keep the technical foundation solid — structured data, self-contained content, crawler accessibility — as we covered in our GEO guide: still necessary, just no longer sufficient on its own.

How we work on this at Evicron

In our SEO and AI-ready web projects we’ve started measuring citation by format, not just by page: what share of your target queries get resolved by video, by forum, or by written content, and where the next content-production euro actually makes sense. It’s a layer of analysis very few SEO providers in Spain are running yet.

Want to know which format is genuinely getting you cited, and which one is wasting your time? Get in touch: we start with a real visibility audit, not a generic list of content best practices.