Google's AI Mode cites social sources half as often as AI Overviews does

Roughly two in three Google AI Overview answers cite at least one social or community source, while Google’s AI Mode does so in about one in three, per an SE Ranking analysis of 100,000 keywords spanning 20 niches, published October 2 via Planable’s blog (SE Ranking’s own tool, SE Visible, ran the AI-citation side of the study). Across the same organic dataset, 76.73% of ordinary Google top-10 results carried a social or community link, with Reddit alone appearing in 46.28% of them.

The citation mix varies sharply by platform and topic. YouTube was AI Overviews’ single most-cited domain, at 16.2% of all citations; LinkedIn’s share spiked to 21.42% of career- and jobs-topic AI Overviews, against 3.15% across all topics combined. In AI Mode, social sources appeared in 48.58% of answers to non-branded queries versus 39.34% for branded ones.

The study did not publish a comparable exact citation rate for ChatGPT, so how AI Mode’s social reliance stacks up against OpenAI’s own answer engine is left open.