8 Weeks of AI Citation Data, Uncut (Including What Failed)

0:00 Eight Weeks of AI Citation Data Overview
Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. So this is all the good, bad, and the ugly. Eight weeks of citation data, unedited, including the parts that didn’t go our way. Don’t you love a good case study? Let’s dig into it here. So we’re doing snapshots of all the content we’re publishing on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and so we can create ongoing data points with the duplicates removed of what’s showing up in Google’s AI overview.

0:29 Citation Count and Share Growth Numbers
So on the 23rd of June, we had forty-eight citations, and as of August 17th, we have eighty-six citations. So our citation share has gone from thirty-eight to forty-four percent. A really strong growth there. And if you wanna see it, here’s a graph here. You can see, you can see our AI search volume went from around sixty-three– And the sad thing is we have zero videos cited so far. Hey, wah, wah, you can’t win all the time. We did started doing– we just did start doing video about a month ago or so, and it does feel like that you need a good ninety days of content, ninety to, like, a hundred and fifty days of doing content before it really starts showing up everywhere. So I can’t say that video is a failure because it’s too early yet, right? And what we’re seeing in this graph here is sort of like we can see that– And what we’re seeing here is the PushLeads visibility growth over time. And here to look at our growth versus the whole category. Our own citation growth has grown seventy-nine percent, where the total panel growth is sixty-four percent. So we’re seeing basically our share rising from thirty-eight percent to forty-four percent, and that’s growing faster than any other pool in the category. And growing faster than the pool is the only number worth defending in front of skeptics, right? So what about video?

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

1:46 Did Video Bend the Citation Curve
How much is video actually helping? So before video, we have gone from forty-eight to sixty-nine citations, forty-four percent growth over four weeks, an average growth of nine point five percent every week. After video, thirty-two point seven percent growth per week, and we’re uploading videos every week. So it’s the same slope before and after. Video did not bend the curve, and we can’t pin growth on video. Again, we’ve only been doing it for, like, a couple months, right? So it’s way too early.

2:14 Zero of Fourteen Cited Videos Were Ours
And the hard truth here is that zero out of fourteen cited videos were ours, right? Across the questions we, we tracked, we just started turning this tracking on, and we are doing more videos so that we expect that to change. But every AI-cited YouTube video, none of them came from us. None of them was ours. Though our blog page on the website about contractors using YouTube did get cited alongside a stranger’s video on the same question. Our page one, but the embedded video did not. So we actually checked with YouTube and said, "Hey, where do our actual…" So we checked with YouTube to find out where our videos actually rank.

2:51 YouTube Rankings vs AI Citation Eligibility
And for common questions like contractors using YouTube to get more calls, restoration companies to get insurance referrals, building a silo structure in WordPress, these didn’t show up. But this one did show up as number one, why restoration company isn’t at the top of Google, right? So w- ranking number one– So, so the odd thing here is that ranking number one on YouTube still did not earn an AI citations, but being retrievable did. So that’s good. Our own videos aren’t getting cited. We essentially were doing topics around dashboards, software, almost zero overlap, right, with buyer questions that we actually track. We’re not in the candidate pool. Four of our five questions were nowhere in YouTube’s top twenty. So if the YouTube isn’t going to service you, then an AI is not gonna consider you easier, either. And then was bypassed on the seventeenth. The engine appears to search with its own rephrased version of the question. And then we tested what happens when we embed the video on the site.

3:48 Embedding Video on Pages Before and After
Do we get better results there? Only at thirty days on this test, but we embedded the video on twenty pages and tracked before and after, and basically eighteen pages were flat with no change, twenty-six pages, their impressions gained, and then some actually went back there from seven point four to nine point three. So if someone says that video is everything, be very wary about that because it’s still early on and video does help. And of course, a huge portion of AI citations is video, but the jury is still out as far as how it all works.

4:21 Three Takeaways Track Share Not Mentions
So what we’d actually tell you what to work on, you wanna track the share not mentions. The raw citation counts are gonna rise with category growth. The share will tell you where you’re outpacing the pool, and that’s the only defensible metric. You wanna publish answers to questions that people actually ask and, and look at your calls and, and make videos answering the common questions that buyers usually ask when they’re searching for your services. And of course, don’t buy video as an AI visibility hack. We tested it on our own site. The slope didn’t change. The demand to see before and after. So if you are working with someone, demand to see before and after video results, again, really early on in the video testing, and then verify your content is the content that’s being cited, right? If YouTube got cited, is it our own YouTube video that got cited or is it different videos? So you should build attribution around that.

5:15 Honest Scorecard Written Content vs Video
So the honest scorecard here is our written content. It’s a– The honest scorecard here is our written content is winning citations and growing citation share faster than a category. Our video is doing nothing measurable in AI answers yet, according to our own internal report. So do you want this, your own version of this table? Do you wanna find out where you are with AI visibility? We’ll give you a free AI visibility audit. You can keep the report either way, no pitch. What you get basically are services, and then what questions you’re missing from entirely, and whether anything you published is actually the thing that’s being quoted. I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk soon.