Five domains carry over 62% of AI Mode citations

Five domains account for more than 62% of citations in Google's AI Mode. Reddit leads at 19.9%, YouTube at 17%, followed by Google's own properties, Facebook and Instagram.

Read what that means for org charts. Two of the five biggest sources of search visibility sit with your social team. One sits with whoever manages your Google Business Profile. Your website is competing for a share of the remaining 38% alongside every other site on the internet.

Presence on those platforms stopped being a brand awareness question. It became a search question, and it should be budgeted like one.

Why the pool concentrated

Grounded retrieval needs sources that answer specific sub-questions in plain language, and it needs them fast. Three things make a domain attractive to that system.

Volume of genuine question-and-answer text. Reddit is close to the only place on the open web where a specific product, in a specific situation, gets discussed by people with no commercial stake, at scale, with the useful answer visibly upvoted.

Video with transcripts. YouTube gives retrieval a searchable text layer over demonstrations that no article can replicate. When the sub-question is what does this actually look like when it fails, video is the only honest source.

Structured, verified business data. Google's own properties, including Business Profile data, supply the facts a system needs to state something confidently about a company.

Your website has none of those advantages structurally. It has one: it is the authoritative source on your own products, pricing and methodology. That is worth defending, and it is a smaller slice than most marketing plans assume.

What to do about Reddit, honestly

The wrong move is obvious and popular: seed threads, run accounts that look organic, pay someone to recommend your product. Reddit's moderators are extremely good at detecting this, the removal is fast, and the reputational damage when it surfaces is worse than the visibility was ever worth. Google's own guidance also says manufacturing brand mentions is not as helpful as claimed.

What works is slower.

Answer as yourself, with the affiliation stated. Most large subreddits allow a company representative to answer a direct technical question if they disclose who they are and do not pitch. Engineers and technical staff do this far better than marketers, because they answer the question asked.

Make the product easy to discuss accurately. Public specifications, published pricing logic, clear model numbers. Threads form around products people can describe precisely. Companies that hide pricing behind a form get discussed less accurately and less often.

Monitor the threads that already exist. Search your brand and your category on Reddit. There will be threads. Some will contain outdated or wrong information about your product that is being retrieved and cited right now. Correcting one factual error with a sourced reply is worth more than a month of posting.

Accept that you do not control it. This is the trade. Reddit is a citation source precisely because it is not a marketing channel. The moment it becomes one for you, it stops working.

YouTube as the controllable one

Of the five, YouTube is the one where a company can move deliberately, and it is the most under-used by mid-market and enterprise Australian businesses.

The mistake is producing brand films. A three-minute company overview with drone footage gets cited by nothing, because it answers no question.

What gets retrieved is a video that answers one specific question in its title, delivers the answer in the first 40 seconds, and has an accurate transcript. Chapters help. A description that restates the answer in text helps more. Production value matters far less than specificity.

Ten videos, each answering one real buyer question, will do more for search visibility than one expensive brand piece. That is an uncomfortable reallocation for a marketing team with a video budget already committed, and it is the right one.

Instagram, Facebook and Google properties

These behave differently. They are cited less for problem-solving content and more for identity: confirming a business exists, what it does, where it operates, what it looks like.

The practical work is unglamorous. Complete profiles. Consistent business name, address and phone across every listing. A Google Business Profile with current information, real photos and answered questions. sameAs markup on your website pointing at every profile you own, so the systems can connect them to one entity.

That is a half-day of work at most companies and it is routinely skipped because it does not feel like strategy.

What this does not mean

It does not mean abandon your website. The 38% that sits outside the big five is where your product pages, pricing, methodology and project evidence compete, and that content converts far better than anything on a platform you rent.

It also does not mean chase citation volume for its own sake. AI referral traffic is still around 1% of sessions for most sites, although it converts unusually well. Semrush puts AI-referred visitors at roughly 4.4 times the conversion rate of ordinary organic. Small volume, high quality.

The reason to care is not the referral. It is that being cited is what a buyer reads while forming a shortlist, and it is worth roughly double the click-through of not being cited on the same query.

The budget conversation to have

Look at where your search budget sits today. Almost certainly the majority is on your own website, with social funded separately as brand, and video funded occasionally as a campaign.

Then look at the citation split again. Two of the five biggest sources of search visibility are being managed by a team whose success is measured in engagement.

That is not a social media problem. It is an organisational one, and fixing it costs nothing but a decision about who owns the number.