AI Started Citing Our Videos: 4 Citations, 2 Engines, 13 Days

0:00 493 Videos Zero AI Citations
Two weeks ago, we published a video with a number in the title, 493 videos, zero citations. That number was real. We had checked every video we and our clients had ever put out, and not one of them had ever been cited by chat GPT, by perplexity, or by a Google AI overview. Today that has changed, and I want to show you exactly what changed and what did not. Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads. I help local business owners get more leads without struggle or frustration. This isn’t a new hustle for me. I’ve been getting businesses found online since before smartphones. So let’s get into how to get your YouTube videos cited by AI Search. Here is where we started.

0:43 13 Days Later Four Citations Appear
In late August, we ran the check across every engine we track, zero. Nothing we had produced had been pulled into an AI answer as a source. We published that result because it was true, and because most of what you read about video and AI search is somebody guessing, we were not going to add to that. 13 days later, we ran the same check again. Four of our videos are now cited across two different engines. Perplexity is citing us. Google AI overviews are citing us. Same channel, same method, same 40 queries. The only thing that changed in between was how we set the videos up on our own website, and I will get to that.

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

1:23 Which Four Videos Got Cited
These are the four. A video on why a restoration company is not showing up in Google, cited by Perplexity twice, on two separate weekly checks. So it held rather than flickering in once. A vertical short on what water damage restoration costs, cited by Google. A video on dashboard features, cited with a timestamp link 12 seconds in, which tells you Google read our key moment markup and followed it. And one on choosing a restoration agency, cited four days after it went live. Now here’s the number I care about more.

1:55 Page Citations Beat Video Citations
Of the 40 queries we checked, 12 had an AI overview that cited a PushLeads page, not the video, the article. That is a better outcome, and it is worth understanding why. When an AI overview cites your video, the click goes to YouTube. That is good for your name, and it does nothing for your phone. Our video appearances in Search Console over the last 28 days came to 58 impressions and zero clicks. When an AI overview cites your page, the visitor lands on your website, where your number and your form are, both results come from the same setup. Only one of them books a job.

2:33 Why Transcript Text Is the Real Signal
Here is the whole trick, and it is not complicated. Language models read text. They do not watch your video. If your video sits on a page as an embedded player and nothing else, a text first crawler sees an empty box, put the transcript on the page as readable text, and suddenly the model has something to read that is tied to a page it can cite. That is why our dashboard citation came with a timestamp attached.

3:00 What the Winning Setup Looks Like
So here is what worked. In order, answer one question your buyers actually ask, not a topic you find interesting. Build the page first, because the video supports a page, it does not replace one, publish the full transcript on that page as readable text, then wait three to four weeks. Our fastest citation took four days, and that was on a topic where we already ranked in the top three. Most took a lot longer.

3:26 Production Format and Volume Did Not Matter
Now the part most people leave out, production format made no difference. We can measure two of the four -sided videos are me on camera, two are a digital twin over a slide deck, volume did not help either. We put out 82 videos in 30 days and four are cited. The citations landed on the videos that answer a narrow question and have a page behind them, not on the ones that got the most polish.

3:51 How Unloaded AI Overviews Create False Zeros
And be careful how you measure this. On our first pass, 28 of the 38 AI overviews came back as stubs that had not finished loading. We had to re -request them with a different flag to see what they actually cited, a tool that reports an unfinished overview as not cited will hand you a false zero. Ours did exactly that until we found it and fixed it. And every citation number we published before that understated reality.

4:18 Duplicate Post Stole the Clean URL
One more thing worth your time. While checking this, we found the AI overview was citing a page that did not contain the video. Two posts existed on the same topic, a thin one written in July that published automatically in September, and the real one with the video and the transcript, WordPress will not put two posts on the same address. So the good one got a dash two on the end and the thin one owned the clean address. Before you create a page, check whether a scheduled post already owns that address. Four citations out of 300 videos is not a victory lap. It is the first real evidence that one specific approach works and the approach is boring. Answer one question per page, put a video on it, publish the transcript, wait a month, measure it honestly. If you want to know where your own visibility stands right now, link in the description or call 828 -348 -7686.