Why AI Keeps Citing YouTube (6,102 Times Across My 39 Clients)

0:00 YouTube Cited 6,102 Times Across 39 Clients
Hey, I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Basically, YouTube got cited six thousand times in AI answers about my clients, and none of this content was actually their content. So let’s dig into this. And yeah, it was one domain that showed up six thousand one hundred and two times forty clients’ websites. It was YouTube. And for the overwhelming majority of the citations, video was being cited along– And for the, and for the overwhelming majority of these citations, video– the video being cited belonged to someone else, a competitor, like a national brand. So some guy in another state with a ring light and a phone, right? It’s kinda crazy.

0:45 What I Measured and How
And so what I actually measured with thirty-nine local businesses, and these were restoration contractors, HVAC contractors, plumbing, dumpster rental, roofing companies, a med spa, a dog bar, and a country club. A huge wide range of clients, right? And we’re doing weekly snapshots where we run– And we’re doing weekly snapshots where we run real buyer questions through AI search, right? And then we’re citing how– And then every cited AI domain gets logged per client per snapshot, right? So we are doing really great measurement. And it’s also logged. This is not a model. It’s not estimated. It’s not sampled from a panel. It’s not research. It’s recorded from actual data from my clients. And the question is: Who owns this outside fifty-six percent?

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

1:35 YouTube Dominates Outside Citations
Well, not surprisingly, it’s YouTube, right? YouTube showed up in twenty-four out of thirty-nine of my clients with their answers, right? Fifteen of those had Reddit, and like, you know, eleven had Facebook. So YouTube alone is thirty-seven percent of every citation that did not go to a client’s site. And that’s– and it’s, and it’s basically a lot more than Reddit and Facebook combined. And so the honest– So the, so the honest version here is that clients’ websites still out-cite YouTube per client, but that’s not the point, right? So for one of my clients, Wagbar, their own site had forty-three hundred citations, whereas YouTube had twenty-three hundred. Another, a med spa, had seven hundred and ninety-five versus YouTube at three hundred and seventeen. And then my own agency, PushLeads.com, had two hundred and thirty-four versus a hundred and five. So this shows you that YouTube is the single largest outside source in AI answers for most of these. And in many cases, this voice is a stranger. So the real question is: Why do machines keep reaching for YouTube?

2:40 Why AI Keeps Reaching for Video
Why do they keep reaching for video? Well, video is machine-readable, right? Every upload, every video should have a transcript, a description, titles and chapters, and a clean, and clean structured text in- attached to a demonstration. So when you do all those things, when you upload a video with the title, the description, and the captions, and also putting the chapters in there, all of that really helps. And of course, we know that Google owns YouTube, so draw your own conclusions about how that affects the services for AI answers. And then text is just sort of bad at showing, so engines are leaning on video for demonstrations, walkthroughs, what does this actually look like questions. And here’s another crazy thing that surprised me. And here’s another thing that surprised me initially and surprises people, and that, and that is this: Video count barely mattered.

3:32 Video Count Barely Matters for AI Citations
Let’s take a look at my YouTube channel here, right? So I’m posting longs or whatever we call them here. But, um, so at this point, I’m just ramping this channel back up. You can see here that I’ve gotten three subscribers in the last twenty-eight days. Not a big deal there, right? And I definitely wanna grow my subscriber count, but I really cared, but I really care more about actually producing content, right? So if I show you here my videos, they’re getting one, two, five, eight views, right? They’re not getting much, but these are videos that are six minutes, eight minutes, eleven minutes, thirteen minutes. Down here, I did one that’s thirty-five minutes, right? And so these long videos, or anything longer than three minutes, it’s not a Short. These are the ones that are actually showing up. These long videos are the ones that get cited by AI. So it doesn’t actually matter that I’m getting one, two, or five, or zero views. And long-form video gets about ninety-five percent of the AI citations, whereas the Shorts bring people to the channel, but only five percent of Shorts actually get cited. So bottom line for no views, if you wanna get cited by Google, you need to be making high-quality video content like this.

4:45 The New Scoreboard Beyond Sessions and Clicks
And here’s data that backs you up. You’re not competing on views, right? So if we look here, if you look, the average view count for videos was around four hundred views, and these were tight answer first transcript videos. This is what gets cited. If you look at another forty thousand videos that are like ninety seconds with intro animation, that’s all getting skipped. So the engine isn’t ranking your video on popularity. It’s reading it, deciding whether or not it answers the question cleanly, and then moving on. And here’s some more data from my own agency that backs this up. So my own website, PushLeads.com, had around two hundred and one thousand impressions over the last thirty days, and we only got forty-four clicks, right? So this is not an agency site. This is my PushLeads.com agency. And I only had forty-four clicks. I’m showing up in AI answers. And really, we’re moving away from making content for humans, and we’re making content for AI. You are a real human watching this video, but we have to make it for humans and AIs, right? So AIs are coming to the page, extracting the answer, giving it to the person who’s searching on the AI, and never sending that person to the website. This is the new normal. Get used to it, right? And what we’re talking about is the new scoreboard here, right? The– In the old days, we used to care about sessions, clicks, rankings, but the new scoreboard is, are you the source that’s being read? Is this? Are you So, but the new scoreboard is this: are you the source that’s being read? Are you the citation’s share of the answer? And which domains are beating you to it? So if you judge your marketing purely by sessions, you’ll conclude that your own SEO is dying at the same moment it starts working.

6:30 Real Client Citation Doubles in 60 Days
Pay attention to what the AIs are doing, because AI searches for service-based businesses have gone from five percent to fifty percent in the last year, right? And what’s gonna happen throughout ’26 and ’27, it’s probably gonna go from fifty to eighty-five percent, right? Because more and more people are using AI. Pandora’s box has been opened. And these are some of my real clients that actually doubled in the last sixty days. A med spa went from three thirty-four to seven ninety-five. A dumpster rental went from two thirty-eight to four seventy-eight. And then a country club went from seventeen hundred to almost three thousand. And then a plumber went from two sixty-two to three ninety-four, right? So these are no rebuilt websites. This is not any kind of Google Ads, and this is before and after data, right? So what do we actually do for these four clients that actually push the envelope here?

7:19 What Actually Worked and What Did Not
We wrote the questions in answers, not paragraphs. We put the question in the header and the answer in the first two sentences, and the details after that. Search engines actually skip prose and anything that buries the point in paragraph four. We published the question in paragraph form. Instead of just please– we did these– we did this content like this. How fast do you need to dry out a flooded basement, right? We put the content in a way that’s… We titled the content in a way the searcher would actually search for it. And then we kept the review flow happening. Recent, more specific reviews naming the service and the city keep feeding this fresh signal to Google and AIs about what the business does and where. And then, of course, you wanna put a face and a voice on it, which brings us back to the six thousand citation. Now, what did not work? So we embedded the video on like twenty plus pages. So what didn’t work? We embedded the video on like twenty pages of the website and tracked before and after in Search Console, and most of them were pretty flat, right? Most of these pages barely moved at all. We had like twenty-six impressions on new keywords, and one actually page moved backward in Google. So if somebody is selling you video as a ranking hack, they’re selling you something, right? The lift is gonna show somewhere else, right? And whether an… And the– And, and it’s this, whether an engine has a citable transcript-backed source with your name on it, and usually not on your website, right? On YouTube or other places. So this is what you should business…

8:47 Weekend Action Plan for Business Owners
So this is what you should do over a weekend for your own business, or if you’re an SEO person, you should be doing this for your clients. So if you own your own business and you wanna work on your own SEO, this is, this is what you should be doing in a weekend. You should be writing out the top ten questions that customers normally ask you on the phone, write the real questions out, and then you wanna film one video each, answering each question on your phone, and put the answer in the first ten to fifteen seconds on your phone. And put the answer in the first ten to fifteen seconds of the video, and then title the videos as a question. How much does water damage cost? How serious is water damage? Take care of water damage, right? And then when you’re doing the video itself, be sure to put your answer in the first hundred words of that description. And then you can let YouTube generate the transcript, and then you can embed that video on a matching page. So now you have two things an AI can cite instead of one. And this is all n– And this is all done with no crew, no studio, no agency required. So these six thousand citations aren’t going down. Video AIs aren’t going away. The Pandora’s box has been opened. In fact, they’ll just keep going up, right? Probably AI searches will go from fifty percent to maybe eighty-five percent in the next year.

10:02 Free AI Visibility Audit Offer
So the question is: whose face is gonna be on it? Is it gonna be you or your competitors? And if you are curious about this… And if you’re curious, I’ll do a free AI visibility audit. I’ll, I’ll give you a report about which domains get cited when buyers ask about your services and what and where– and what you’re missing from the equation entirely. It takes about a day. The report is free. It’s no pitch. It’s just about giving value. I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk soon.