AI cites small creators, not big ones

Update, September 2026: in our September runs the shared search layer stopped ranking YouTube videos, and ranked far fewer Reddit threads, for standard buying questions. Both still appear when a question asks for videos or opinions, so creators are not blocked, just ranked lower. The older models re-run that month show the same drop, so it is a change in retrieval, not in the models or the categories. The figures below come from the July runs. We will update this note once we know whether the change holds.

Every month we run frozen prompt sets through four AI assistants across consumer categories and resolve every cited source. This note rolls up 21,265 citations across beauty, credit cards, live tv, OTC allergy, and streaming: for each, what share of the sources behind the answer is a creator or community (YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, X, Substack) rather than an indexed website.

Between 6 and 20 percent of the sources behind AI shopping answers are creators and communities. Live TV is the heaviest at 20 percent, mostly YouTube: cord-cutting is a how-to decision and the how-to lives on video. In the July credit card run, YouTube alone out-cited any single issuer's own website.

Of the 1,812 YouTube citations where we resolved channel size: channels under 100K subscribers take 62.5% of citations (361 channels); channels over a million subscribers take 4.9% (28 channels). The mid-tier takes the rest (32.6%). Retrieval rewards specific, recent, question-shaped videos, not audience size.

AI assembles shopping answers from a mixed shelf where creators and communities held a minority share that varies by category, where tiny channels out-cited mega-channels, and where whole platforms can enter or leave the supply in a month. For a brand, the practical reading: the creators worth knowing are the ones AI actually cites in your category, and that list does not match the one reach-based influencer tools produce.