The social platform hierarchy in AI citations is changing. Once dominated by Reddit, citations in large language models are now pointing more often to YouTube.
New data from four sources finds that YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the most frequently cited social platform in AI-generated responses. YouTube had previously fallen behind other user-generated sources because of the difficulty large-language models, or LLMs, have in pulling information from videos, but transcripts, explainers, and other information associated with videos on YouTube have allowed the video platform to flourish as a source that machines can easily read.
Bluefish found that YouTube appeared as a cited source in 16% of LLM answers over the past six months, compared with 10% for Reddit—a reversal from earlier periods when Reddit was the dominant social source.
