What sources does Google's AI Overview use?

Where the sources come from

Google says AI Overviews are built from pages in its search index. To appear as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. There are “no additional technical requirements”. Google also says it may run several related searches across subtopics, a method it calls query fan-out, which is why one answer can link to pages that don’t rank for the original question (Google Search Central, updated 10 December 2025).

That explains where Google looks, but not what it picks, so we counted.

What Google’s AI cited in 36 answers

Source type	Citations	Share
Web pages (articles, vendor guides, tool pages)	233	70%
Videos and social posts	83	25%
Forums (Reddit, Quora)	10	3%
LinkedIn articles	4	1%
Wikipedia	1	under 1%
Total	331

YouTube was the most-cited site, with 57 citations (17%). TikTok came second with 20. No web domain came close: the most-cited websites had 6 citations each. The 331 citations came from 190 different sites, so apart from YouTube no single site dominates.

30 of the 36 answers cited at least one video or social post. In 14 of them, the first source Google listed was a video.

How many sources does an AI Overview cite?

The median answer in our sample cited 9 sources. The fewest was 5 and the most was 13.

That’s more than Google’s own AI suggests. Google’s own AI Overview for “what sources does google ai overview use” told us answers “synthesize information from 3 to 6 different web pages”. Its sources for that claim were SEO and marketing blogs. In our sample, no answer cited fewer than 5.

Which questions draw video, and which don’t

The share of video depends on the question. How-to questions about marketing on social platforms and in travel drew the most. Definitions and software questions drew the least. These groups come from the 25 answers captured on 21 October.

Questions about	Video or social sources
Travel agencies and travel brands	16 of 34 (47%)
TikTok and social media SEO	23 of 58 (40%)
Hotel marketing	11 of 36 (31%)
AI visibility	8 of 60 (13%)
Destinations and tourism boards	3 of 27 (11%)

Two answers from 26 October show the difference most clearly. For “how to get your brand mentioned in chatgpt”, 4 of the 8 sources were YouTube videos. For “how to get cited in google ai overviews”, none of the 13 were.

Who made the videos

Not the brands the questions were about. In the hotel answers, the TikTok videos came from social media marketers’ accounts, and the YouTube videos were marketing tutorials. Judging by titles and handles, none was a hotel’s own travel video.

If you market a hotel, this matters: Google answered hotel marketing questions partly with other people’s videos.

What to do with this

• Count videos when you track AI answers. If your tracking only records which web pages are cited, it misses a quarter of the sources in our sample, and close to half for travel agency questions.
• Check who made the videos. A creator’s review, a booking site’s clip and your own channel need different responses. You can brief a creator. You can’t brief a booking site.
• Don’t rely on schema. Google says no special markup is needed, and only 23% of the cited pages we checked had FAQ markup. See how to get cited in Google AI Overviews.
• Look at the same question on YouTube and TikTok. The videos Google cites already sit on those platforms. Searching there shows who made them and whether you are among them, and a video is something a travel brand can brief and publish within weeks.