Two in Three Google AI Overviews Now Cite Social Media. Your Profiles Are Part of Your SEO.

For most businesses, SEO and social media live in different worlds. One team worries about rankings, another worries about posting schedules, and they rarely compare notes.

A study published this month suggests that split no longer makes sense, at least for Google’s AI answers.

What the study found

SE Ranking analysed 100,000 keywords across a range of brand niches to see which sources appear in Google’s AI results and in ChatGPT. Social Media Today reported the findings on 7 October:

• Social platform links appeared in 67.66% of Google AI Overview responses.
• They appeared in 32.39% of Google AI Mode replies.
• They appeared in 8.4% of ChatGPT answers.

YouTube was the most commonly cited source in Google’s AI Overviews, which is perhaps not surprising given Google owns it. In ChatGPT, Reddit and LinkedIn were the most-referenced social platforms, though each still showed up in fewer than 1% of answers to common queries.

One more detail worth knowing: Reddit’s share of ChatGPT search citations reportedly fell by 86.4% in four days in August. These sources move around a lot, which is a good reason not to bet everything on one platform.

What this means in plain terms

When someone asks Google a question in your industry, there’s a very good chance the AI answer will point to a video, a post or a discussion rather than only to websites. If your business has no presence there, you’re missing from a large part of the answer, even if your website ranks well.

The flip side is encouraging. A helpful YouTube video or a well-written LinkedIn post can now earn you visibility in search results that used to need a high-authority website and years of backlinks.

Where to start

YouTube first, if Google matters to you. Since YouTube is the most-cited source in AI Overviews, short, practical videos that answer one question each are worth more than they used to be. Clear titles, real descriptions and chapters help Google understand what each video covers. Polish matters less than being genuinely useful.

Make your LinkedIn company page and founder profiles complete. An empty company page with a logo and no posts isn’t a source anyone will cite. A page that explains what you do, plus founders who post real opinions and lessons, gives AI tools something to work with.

Be useful on Reddit, not promotional. If your customers ask questions in specific communities, answering honestly as a person, without pitching, builds the kind of presence that gets cited. There is more on how Reddit fits into marketing in Why Reddit Became the Most Powerful Marketing Channel in 2026.

Keep the story consistent. Your website, social bios and profiles should describe your business the same way. AI answers pull from all of them, and contradictions make you look less certain.

You can start measuring this too

Bing has added a beta Topics Portfolio report to the AI Performance section of Bing Webmaster Tools. It groups AI citations by topic and shows citation volumes as ranges, along with how many sites are cited for each topic. It’s early, but it’s one of the first tools that shows where you stand in AI answers by subject rather than by keyword.

On the Google side, Search Console now reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, though not clicks yet.

The practical takeaway

Your social presence used to be about reach and engagement. Now it’s also part of how search engines understand and recommend you.

That doesn’t mean you need to be everywhere. It means the two or three platforms your customers actually use should be treated as properly as your website. If you want a second opinion on where to focus, our social media and SEO teams work on this together, which is exactly how it should be done now.