Transcript:

Hi, I’m Chris Long with Nectiv, and for today’s GEO tip, I want to talk about why YouTube is a critical strategy for GEO and AI search moving forward.

We’re seeing YouTube in particular get cited a lot in these AI-driven features — especially in Google’s AI Overviews. Here we can see it’s getting cited 9 million different instances. So AI Overviews are citing YouTube a lot, especially for tech and SaaS queries.

For example, if I search something like “best AI note taker”, here’s a video that aggregates AI note takers. Here’s another video that aggregates them. We’ve seen up to three videos appearing here. I search for email automation — same thing. I see one video at the very top, and if I scroll down, it’s another comprehensive tutorial.

So, AI Overviews is integrating YouTube quite a bit into its technology.

It’s also interesting that many of these videos have the exact keyword targeted in the YouTube thumbnail. That could be another potential strategy if you’re looking to improve your YouTube visibility.

We’re also seeing this impact more traditional LLMs, not just AI Overviews. Here’s our tracker for a lot of software-related keywords. We see Reddit ranked number one — that’s one of the biggest sources — but YouTube is actually in the fifth position across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode. In particular, Perplexity tends to pull the most YouTube citations.

So don’t ignore video if you’re looking to optimize against AI search. It’s getting cited a lot — and quite frequently — being pulled into AI-driven features such as AI Overviews and even traditional LLMs, as seen in our AI tracking technology.