The 50 domains Google AI Overviews cite most

Reddit, YouTube and Quora occupy the top three spots in Ahrefs' ranking of the domains Google's AI Overviews cite most often, ahead of every newspaper, encyclopedia and government site on the web. The Ahrefs blog, publishing its June 2026 audit of AI Overview citations, found user-generated content dominates the surface that now sits atop search results for roughly two billion monthly users across 200-plus countries.

That is the single most consequential fact in B2B marketing this quarter. Google's own AI layer, which intercepts the query before a user ever reaches the blue links, treats a Reddit thread as more authoritative than the Financial Times, the World Bank or any individual company's owned media.

What the ranking actually says

Ahrefs' top ten skews heavily toward forums, video and reference sites: Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, plus a cluster of mass-market publishers. Specialist B2B outlets are largely absent. Government and multilateral domains appear, but lower than their domain authority would predict. Vendor sites, with a handful of exceptions in software documentation, barely register.

The mechanism is not mysterious. AI Overviews are tuned to answer questions, and questions are most cleanly answered by content already written in question-and-answer form. Reddit threads, Quora pages and YouTube transcripts are essentially pre-formatted training data for a question-answering model. Press releases and thought-leadership PDFs are not.

The B2B problem hiding inside a consumer ranking

It is tempting to dismiss the list as a consumer-search artefact. A CFO researching custody banks, a procurement lead at a cement major, a programme officer at a UN agency: surely they are not getting their answers from Reddit.

They are, more than the industry admits. Ahrefs' data covers the full Overviews surface, and the same citation logic governs commercial and professional queries. A search for "best core banking platform for tier-2 banks" or "how does ISO 14064 verification work" pulls from whatever corpus best matches the question shape. That corpus increasingly skews to community forums and video, because that is where the question shape lives.

For financial services brands, this means a Bogleheads thread can outrank a JPMorgan research note in the AI summary a client sees first. For multilaterals, a Reddit explainer can sit above a UN agency's own technical guidance. For industrial groups, a niche engineering forum can define the category before the category leader's website is even consulted. For policy institutions, a Wikipedia paragraph (often citing a decade-old source) can become the canonical answer.

What the absent domains have in common

The interesting list is not the top 50 but the names missing from it. Tier-one B2B publishers, most consultancies, nearly all law firms, and the vast majority of corporate newsrooms do not appear. The reasons are consistent: gated content, PDF-first publishing, marketing copy that argues rather than answers, and a structural reluctance to write in the plain interrogative form that Overviews reward.

This is a fixable problem, and the fix is unglamorous. Brands that want to be cited need to publish content that directly answers the questions their buyers actually type, in language a model can extract, on pages a model can crawl. That means HTML over PDF, specific numbers over adjectives, named authors with verifiable credentials, and a willingness to write the boring middle of the funnel: definitions, comparisons, procedures, edge cases.

It also means accepting that earned presence on Reddit, YouTube and Quora is now a distribution channel, not a reputational risk to be managed. The domains Google's model trusts are the domains where your category is already being discussed without you.

The compounding effect

Citation patterns in AI Overviews are self-reinforcing. A domain cited often gets clicked often, gets linked often, and accumulates the engagement signals that make it more likely to be cited next time. The top 50 will calcify before it diversifies. Brands waiting for the ranking to "normalise" toward traditional authority signals are waiting for something that is not coming.

The practical read for senior marketers: audit which of the top 50 domains carry conversations about your category, and decide within the next quarter whether to participate, sponsor, contribute expertise, or cede the surface. Ceding it is a choice, and increasingly an expensive one.