{
 "question": "Which YouTube videos do Google AI Overviews cite, and, within the same search, how do they differ from the YouTube videos Google showed on the results page but did not cite?",
 "population": "800 US keywords (100 per industry, eight industries) from the study 4 sample; Google results pages and 400 AI Mode answers from Google.com, US, English, desktop, 26 September 2026. Version 1.1 adds every YouTube video shown on page one of the same searches; all cited and shown videos were re-fetched from YouTube on 28 September 2026 so both groups are measured on the same day.",
 "inclusion": "All 800 searches for the stage figures; searches with an AI Overview for shown-to-cited rates; searches where the AI Overview cited at least one shown video and did not cite at least one other shown video for within-search comparisons.",
 "exclusion": "",
 "calculations": [
  "Shown on page one: a YouTube URL in an organic result, the video pack, the short-videos row or the What people are saying row; each video counted once per search, at its first appearance.",
  "Cited: a YouTube URL among the AI Overview's references or in-text links, in reading order.",
  "Concordance: for each search, the share of (cited, shown-not-cited) video pairs in which the cited video has the higher value, ties counted as half, averaged over searches; 50% means no difference.",
  "Conditional logit: cited against shown-not-cited with one stratum per search, standardized predictors (log views, log subscribers, age, log length, title match, description match, log description length); odds ratios per standard deviation with model-based 95% intervals.",
  "Title and description match: share of the search's words (lowercased, common words removed, simple plural stripping) that appear in the video's title or description.",
  "Snippet source: whether the first 40 characters of the text Google shows under a cited video (after the title) appear in the video's description.",
  "Intervals: 95% bootstrap resampling seed topics (2,000 resamples, seed 20260926)."
 ],
 "limitations": [
  "The control group is the videos Google showed on page one, not every video Google's AI could have retrieved; 84.9% of cited videos were not on page one at all, so the comparison covers the shown-to-cited step only.",
  "Observational, one run per search on one date: the study shows which videos were cited, not why, and run-to-run variation is not measured.",
  "Citation is not use: whether the answer took anything from the video, and represented it correctly, is not measured; nor are clicks.",
  "View and subscriber counts were read on 28 September 2026, two days after the searches; YouTube rounds subscriber counts.",
  "Word match is a crude relevance measure; transcripts were not analyzed."
 ],
 "update": "Quarterly; a second collection date is planned with study 24.",
 "@context": "https://schema.org",
 "@type": "Dataset",
 "name": "The YouTube videos Google\u2019s AI cites are small",
 "version": "1.1",
 "dateCreated": "2026-09-26",
 "creator": {
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Underneath",
  "url": "https://underneath.agency"
 },
 "url": "https://underneath.agency/research/ai-overview-youtube-videos-study",
 "temporalCoverage": "2026-09-26",
 "isAccessibleForFree": true,
 "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
 "code": "cite/pipeline/ (collection, validation and analysis scripts)",
 "variableMeasured": [
  "reanalyzed",
  "collected",
  "videos_fetched_on",
  "n_searches",
  "n_seed_topics",
  "videos_refetched",
  "bootstrap",
  "stages_all_searches",
  "outcome_states",
  "cited_videos_vs_page",
  "cited_given_shown",
  "prominence",
  "within_search",
  "conditional_logit",
  "cited_shown_vs_not",
  "snippet_source",
  "ai_mode",
  "by_industry"
 ],
 "dateModified": "2026-09-28",
 "research_questions": {
  "RQ1": "Stages: across all 800 searches, how often does an AI Overview appear, YouTube appear on page one, and the AI Overview cite a YouTube video?",
  "RQ2": "Shown to cited: given that Google shows a video on page one, how likely is the AI Overview to cite it, by results-page feature and slot?",
  "RQ3": "Within the same search, do cited videos differ from shown-but-not-cited videos in views, channel size, age, length, match to the search words, captions and description?",
  "RQ4": "Does the pattern hold for AI Mode and across industries?",
  "RQ5": "Absorption and fidelity: does the answer use what the video says, and use it correctly? Not answered."
 },
 "framework": "Visibility is treated as stages: AI Overview shown, video shown on the results page (the only observable retrieval proxy), cited, prominence in the reference list. Absorption (did the video shape the answer), fidelity (is it represented correctly) and user outcomes are named but not measured."
}