What Type of Content Does Google AI Overviews Cite the Most? - Q1 2026
Klaas FoppenWhat Type of Content Gets Cited by
AI Overviews in Q1 2026?
Based on Promptwatch data from Jan 1 - Apr 5, 2026. Covers 20,371,054 classified citations. The chart shows the percentage breakdown of citation content types per day. Only citations with a classified content type are included.
What this means for you
Across all of Q1 2026, listicles remain the format Google AI Overviews cites most, averaging around 26% of daily citations, well ahead of news articles (~15%) and how-to guides (~12%). The top of the leaderboard didn't change all quarter, but the edges did: listicles drifted down a couple of points from January to early April.
Those points went to video and social. Video citations roughly doubled over the quarter (from ~2.7% to ~5.4% of daily citations) and social posts climbed from ~3.7% to ~5.1%. Google is slowly diversifying AI Overviews beyond classic articles into video and community content.
How to act on it
- Keep list-format content at the center of your AI Overviews strategy. Even after a slight decline, listicles still out-earn every other format by a wide margin.
- Start producing (or optimizing) video: its citation share roughly doubled across the quarter, and most brands have no video assets competing for those slots yet.
- Don't write off social platforms for Google visibility: social posts grew from about 3.7% to over 5% of citations, so an active presence in relevant communities now feeds AI Overviews too.
How we collect this data
We collect millions of prompt responses, citations, and click data from the actual user interfaces of major AI platforms: over 26 billion data points and growing. This gives us one of the largest datasets on how AI search engines cite sources and recommend brands.
Real UI monitoring
Data straight from the interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews, and more.
26B+ data points
Over 26 billion analyzed citations, prompts, and responses, one of the largest AI search datasets available.
Continuously updated
Refreshed constantly so the trends you see reflect the latest behavior of AI search engines.
Aggregated & public
Published freely for the GEO community, based on aggregated, non-identifiable trends.
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