• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, February 26, 2026

Across all categories and AI platforms tracked in Tinuiti’s “AI Citations Trends Report-Q1 2026" released Thursday, the share attributed to social media climbed from October through January, topping 9% in the first month of the year.

Other than Reddit -- which has gained a major presence in AI query citations -- YouTube is the only other major social media platform to top 1% of citations consistently, according to the report.

Tinuiti, an independent ad agency, tracked nine categories to understand how different domains are cited by major AI platforms over time to better understand the ones that will ultimately be used to craft generative AI answers.

Apparel, beauty, electronics, food and beverage, home and garden, manufacturing, OTC health, technology, and transportation and logistics were the categories tracked. The AI platforms include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta AI.

The report describes the collection of tracked prompts as having mid- to-lower funnel commercial intent. Unless otherwise noted, cross-platform citation shares are calculated using an average of the platforms studied, ignoring the relative popularity of specific platforms and features, according to Tinuiti.

Although YouTube appeared to gain some ground on Reddit in November, that trend was quickly reversed in December.

Reddit as a citation source has grown across all industries and platforms.  Reddit citation share grew by at least 73% from October to January, and more than doubled for some industries.

Even for industries that showed another platform was the top source of social media citations in October -- such as YouTube for travel and logistics prompts -- Reddit was the top platform by January.

AI citations vary significantly by industry. For example, TikTok accounted for 0.06% of beauty AI citations in January, but just 0.02% of all citations in the same month.

There are differences in social-media citation share, depending on the AI platform. For example, nearly 7% of all ChatGPT citations were attributed to social media in January, compared with just over 3% for Gemini.

Reddit share was above 5% on ChatGPT, compared with just 0.1% share on Gemini. YouTube was nearly excluded from citations on ChatGPT in January, compared to 0.7% share on Gemini, according to Tinuiti’s report.

Google Gemini, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot have very low social-media share of citations.

Perplexity stands out among the AI platforms and features studied, with 31% of all January citations coming from social media.

Reddit citations account for about 24% of all citations, compared with 3% attributed to YouTube.

Growing social-media content and mentions can influence AI visibility depending on the platform or feature. This is true even between platforms and features run by the same organization.

Specific domains drive AI citations differently even between platforms and features owned by one company.

This is true for Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, three of Google’s AI-powered experiences.

For example, just 3% of Google Gemini citations were attributed to social media in January, compared to 9% of AI Mode citations and 13% of AI Overview citations.

The differences can be attributed to how each one serves a different user purpose. They are all powered by the same underlying technology, but the algorithms are adjusted to prioritize different information types for each task.

There is also huge variation when it comes to how specific social-media platforms are cited.

Reddit accounted for 44% of all January social-media citations for AI Overviews, but only 5% of Google Gemini social citations for the same period. Significant disparities exist in the share of social-media citations attributed to Medium, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn, according to Tinuiti.

Amazon is the most commonly cited ecommerce site across the top generative AI platforms -- accounting for an average of slightly more than 2% of all citations for prompts with commercial intent in January 2026.

Interestingly, according to Tinuiti, Amazon blocked nearly 50 specific user agents in its robots.txt file at the end of January -- and many of them for the most popular AI platforms, such as crawlers used by OpenAI.

While Amazon still accounted for 0.3% of ChatGPT citations in January, per the report (despite blocking OpenAI’s crawlers), it accounted for a much larger share -- 3.3% of citations -- for Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews.

This was not consistent across all of Google’s AI tools, but with Amazon being effectively absent from Google Gemini citations.

Tinuiti worked with Profound as a partner, focusing on data, tracking, and optimization in AI-powered search.