New November 2026 data on the most cited domains in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what B2B brands should do about it.
The most cited domains in Google AI Overviews are YouTube at 24.5%, Reddit at 18.1%, and Facebook at 12.4%, according to Ahrefs' Brand Radar snapshot updated on November 3, 2026. All ten of the top domains lost citations compared with the prior snapshot. A second dataset published the same day puts YouTube at 25.2% and shows LinkedIn at 13.4%, Medium at 7.1%, and Gartner at 3.5%.
Here's what changed. Here's what the two datasets agree on, where they split, and what you can do about it this month. Track this metric for your brand → nobori.ai
YouTube leads with a 24.5% mention share, followed by Reddit (18.1%), Facebook (12.4%), Google (8.6%), and Instagram (5.4%). Ahrefs built the list from more than 3 million US queries in Brand Radar. Mention share is a domain's citations as a percentage of the summed citations of the 50 most-cited sources.
The full top ten reads: YouTube 24.5%, Reddit 18.1%, Facebook 12.4%, Google 8.6%, Instagram 5.4%, Quora 4.4%, Wikipedia 4.4%, TikTok 3.0%, Amazon 2.5%, and Walmart 0.8%. Together they hold 83.1% of the top-50 pool (our sum). Six of the ten are social, video, or community platforms: YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, and TikTok. Those six add up to 67.8%.
YouTube alone has 1,231,678 cited pages in the sample. Reddit has 478,918. No B2B software vendor appears in the top ten. If your buyers research on Google and your content lives on your own domain, you compete for the last 16.9% of the pool with 40 other sources.
Ahrefs reports declines for all ten leaders: YouTube down 11%, Reddit 21%, Facebook 2%, Google 17%, Instagram 20%, Quora 22%, Wikipedia 14%, TikTok 23%, Amazon 31%, and Walmart 27%. Ranks didn't move. Yahoo.com fell the furthest in the top 50, down 42%.
Ahrefs doesn't state the comparison window, so treat the percentages as direction, not a trend line. Still, the shape is clear. The leaders lost volume and kept their order, which points to a pool that spread out instead of a new king.
Here's a detail worth checking in your own reports. In our cross-engine overlap analysis, Ahrefs' September snapshot had YouTube at 22.9% of AI Overview mention share. It sits at 24.5% now, even though its citations fell 11%. Share is relative. If the other leaders shrink faster, YouTube gains share while it loses volume. We read that as the top of the pool getting thinner, not YouTube getting stronger. Four domains entered the top 50: merriam-webster.com at #40, carfax.com at #46, wallethub.com at #48, and mayoclinic.org at #50.
It agrees on the top two and disagrees on everything after. AuthorityTech's Machine Relations Index, dated November 3, 2026, counted 1,274 observed AI Overview runs between May 10 and November 3. YouTube appeared in 321 of them (25.20%) and Reddit in 232 (18.21%). Those figures sit within a point of Ahrefs'.
Then the lists split. In the Index, LinkedIn ranks third at 13.42% (171 runs), Facebook fourth at 7.38%, and Medium fifth at 7.14%. Gartner shows up at 3.45%, Forbes at 2.90%, and G2 and Microsoft at 2.12% each. IBM sits at 1.73% and Palo Alto Networks at 1.57%.
The difference comes from the query set. Ahrefs samples broad US queries across all topics. The Index tracks monitored question libraries, and the classifier tags 14 of its 52 top rows as vendor-owned sources and 5 as market or company databases. Your category's prompts decide which list applies to you. Nobori runs your category's prompts daily across five engines. See your numbers → nobori.ai
Google AI Mode leans on Google's own properties and less on YouTube. In Ahrefs' November 3 AI Mode snapshot, google.com takes 23.4%, Reddit 18.1%, YouTube 17.0%, Facebook 8.3%, and Wikipedia 5.9%. Instagram (2.5%), Quora (1.8%), Amazon (1.6%), TikTok (1.4%), and Edmunds (1.0%) fill out the top ten.
Reddit holds 18.1% in both products, so a Reddit thread that earns an AI Overview citation has a similar shot in AI Mode. YouTube drops 7.5 points between the two. The gap shows why a single blended "Google" number hides the work. You track two surfaces with two source mixes.
The AI Mode movers carry a lesson for B2B teams. Trustpilot gained 137% in citations and 22 places. Yelp gained 76% and 23 places. eBay lost 58%, Instagram 50%, and Walmart 49%. Twelve domains entered the top 50, including mayoclinic.org (26th), imdb.com (29th), and pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (49th). Review platforms and reference sources gained while marketplaces and social feeds shrank.
No. Ahrefs found that 37.9% of AI Overview citations come from the top 10 organic results, 31.2% from positions 11 to 100, and 31.0% from outside the top 100. The study covered 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs. In July 2025, about 76% of cited pages came from the top 10.
Ahrefs' author links the shift to Gemini 3 running wider query fan-outs, and marks that as a guess. Whatever the cause, nearly a third of citations now go to pages that don't rank in the top 100 for the query. Within that group, 18.2% of cited URLs were YouTube videos.
For you, the implication is concrete. Your position-three blog post can sit under an AI Overview that cites a YouTube walkthrough, a Reddit thread, and a LinkedIn article instead. Rank tracking won't show that. A citation tracker will. Read more on how fan-out queries change the picture in our guide to query fan-out optimization.
It means you need presence on three or four third-party surfaces, not only your own site. The Index lists LinkedIn, Medium, Gartner, G2, and Microsoft among the most cited sources. Those are places where a B2B brand can publish, get reviewed, or get quoted.
Start with the surface where your buyers already talk. If your sales calls mention G2 comparisons, your review profile feeds the pool. If your CEO writes on LinkedIn, long-form posts there compete with your blog. If analysts cover your category, a Gartner or similar mention carries weight in the Index data. The Semrush analysis of 100 million AI citations pointed the same way: LinkedIn appeared in about 15% of Google AI Mode responses in its 2025 study window.
We covered the playbook in detail in our off-page AEO guide. The new data adds a priority order: video first if you have the capacity, then review and community profiles, then professional networks.
Trust the direction and doubt the decimals. Each dataset carries limits you should know before you put a figure in a board deck.
Ahrefs updates its pages monthly, with an automated agent writing the refresh. The article doesn't give an exact collection window for the November snapshot, and the percent changes have no stated baseline. The AI Mode page's meta description also lists a different top five than its own table does, so check the table, not the summary.
AuthorityTech's Index is first-party research from the company that sells the service, and the company says so. Runs from September 25 onward came through a different collection path with no overlapping days, so the rates are whole-window levels and not a trend. The Index measures citations in monitored question libraries. It doesn't show that a placement caused a citation, and it doesn't measure buyer demand.
Both datasets are US-focused. Neither splits results by B2B funnel stage. Use them to pick which surfaces to test, then measure your own prompts.
Run your own citation audit and compare it with the public lists. Four steps cover it.
Keep the prompt set fixed so month-over-month changes mean something. For the metric definitions that tie this together, see our breakdown of AI mentions versus citations.
Report citation share by surface, and keep AI Overviews and AI Mode on separate lines. The two Google products share Reddit at 18.1% and split on YouTube at 24.5% versus 17.0%. A blended number would show a flat Reddit story and bury a seven-point YouTube gap.
Add a column for source type: owned, review, community, video, and editorial. When a source type gains share in your category, you'll see it a month before your pipeline does. The Ahrefs AI Mode data shows how fast that moves: Trustpilot rose 22 places in one refresh.
One more thing to put in the report: the count of domains that cite you but that you don't control. If that count is zero, your brand exists in AI answers when your own pages win and at no other time, and the data says your own pages win a minority of the time.
Ready to see where you stand in AI search? Nobori tracks your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude, updated daily. See who gets cited, where you're missing, and what to fix.
Get daily AI visibility alerts for your brand → nobori.ai
Sources: Ahrefs Brand Radar, "The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Overviews" and "Most Cited Domains in AI Mode" (updated November 3, 2026); Ahrefs, "38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10" (2026); AuthorityTech Machine Relations Index (November 3, 2026); Semrush, AI citation study (November 2025).
