Research highlights
There is no single answer to who AI Overviews cite. The mix changes almost entirely depending on the industry.
Company-owned content takes 57.3% of citations in B2B SaaS and 4.6% in real estate. That is a twelve-fold spread across the same search feature.
User generated platforms are the largest single source overall at 43.7% of citations, and the largest category in seven of the ten industries measured. YouTube is the most cited domain in eight of them.
Media and publishers take 5.5% of citations across all ten industries, and register zero share in four of them.
Careers and education sites, meaning job boards, course providers and licensing schools, take 18.0%. In real estate they take more than a quarter of all citations.
Findings
Five things the source mix shows, in order of how much they change what a marketing team should do.
B2B is where owned content still wins
The two industries at the top of the table are the two where the buyer is a business making a considered purchase. B2B SaaS at 57.3% and fractional CMO at 50.4% are the only industries where company-owned content takes more than half of citations.
The four at the bottom, real estate, manufacturing, healthcare and legal, are all industries where a consumer or patient is asking the question, and where directories, institutions or regulators hold the authoritative answer.
| Buyer type | Mean vendor |
|---|---|
| Business buyer (B2B SaaS, fractional CMO, ecommerce, cybersecurity, fintech) | 39.2% |
| Consumer or regulated (marketing, legal, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate) | 8.9% |
The practical version: if you sell to businesses, your own content is competing for citations on roughly even terms. If you sell to consumers, you are competing with Zillow, the CDC and the American Bar Association, and you will lose.
Publishers have almost no share
Media and publishers take 5.5% of citations across the whole sample. In B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, healthcare and fractional CMO the figure is at or near zero.
Where publishers do appear, they are general finance and business titles rather than trade press. Investopedia, Forbes, Bankrate, CNBC and Yahoo Finance account for most publisher citations in the sample. Trade publications serving each industry are almost entirely absent.
| Industry | Media | Publishers in the top 20 |
|---|---|---|
| Fintech | 24.1% | Built In, Forbes, CNBC, Investopedia, TopStartups |
| Real estate | 10.5% | Investopedia, HousingWire, Bankrate |
| Ecommerce | 8.6% | Forbes, Statista, Investopedia |
| Marketing | 6.4% | Investopedia, Forbes |
| B2B SaaS | 6.1% | Built In |
| Manufacturing | 3.5% | Investopedia, Yahoo Finance |
| Legal | 2.9% | Law.com |
| Cybersecurity | 0.0% | none |
| Healthcare | 0.0% | none |
| Fractional CMO | 0.0% | none |
For marketing teams that measure PR by placements in trade press, this is the number to sit with. Media and publishers take 5.5% of AI Overview citations, and those placements reach an audience that AI Overviews barely draw from.
YouTube and Reddit are the default sources
YouTube is the single most cited domain in eight of the ten industries. Reddit is first or second in five. Together with LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Quora and Scribd, user generated platforms take 43.7% of all citations measured.
YouTube is the most cited domain in eight of the ten industries measured. Fractional CMO is the only industry in the sample where a company site, rather than a platform, holds the top position.
A category nobody plans for
Job boards, course providers and licensing schools take 18.0% of citations, more than three times the publisher share.
This is largest in industries with a licensing or certification path. Real estate licensing schools alone, Colibri, Kaplan, AceableAgent, The CE Shop, US Realty Training, 360training and RealEstateU, account for 26.2% of real estate citations. In cybersecurity, Coursera, Western Governors, SNHU and CybersecurityGuide take 24.3%.
Part of this reflects the query mix. Broad industry terms pull "how do I become" and "what does X pay" questions alongside commercial ones. That is a real property of the search surface rather than a flaw to correct, and it means a meaningful share of industry-level AI answers is being written by education providers.
Job boards, course providers and licensing schools take 18.0% of AI Overview citations, more than three times the share going to media and publishers.
Authority is not the filter
The most cited company sites are frequently not the best known ones.
In B2B SaaS the top four company domains are AppDirect, SellersCommerce, CloudBlue and Cognism. None are household names. In fractional CMO the leaders are Chief Outsiders and CMOx, ahead of every marketplace and recruiter in the category. In manufacturing, NetSuite outranks every trade publication.
What the cited pages share is not domain strength. It is specificity: a defined number, a comparison, a stated method. Pages with nothing checkable in them do not get cited, whatever the domain behind them.
What the cited pages share is not domain strength. It is specificity: a defined number, a comparison, a stated method. Pages with nothing checkable in them do not get cited, whatever the domain behind them.
Classification
Sample: 10 industries, 200 most-cited domains, 470,829 AI Overview citations. Google AI Overview, United States, English, September 2026.
Seed terms: b2b saas, fractional cmo, ecommerce, cybersecurity, fintech, real estate, healthcare, law firm, manufacturing, marketing. Each matched against user question text on a partial match. Top 20 cited domains taken per industry.
Each domain was assigned by hand to one of seven types.
| Vendor, agency or brand | Any company publishing on its own domain to sell something, including software vendors, agencies, consultancies and fractional firms. |
| UGC and social | YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Scribd, Medium. |
| Careers and education | Job boards, salary sites, course providers, universities, licensing schools, staffing and freelance marketplaces. |
| Media and publishers | Sites whose primary business is publishing editorial. |
| Government, academic and association | Public bodies, research repositories, journals, professional associations and policy nonprofits. |
| Marketplaces and directories | Listing and review sites. |
| Reference | Wikipedia and Britannica. |
Sources
- DataForSEO LLM Mentions API, Top Mentioned Domains, September 2026.
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