# What Type of Content Does Google AI Overviews Cite the Most? - Q1 2026

This report tracks the daily breakdown of the content types Google AI Overviews cites across Q1 2026 (January to March): listicles, news articles, how-tos, product pages, and more. Use it to see which formats Google prefers and how that mix is shifting.

## What Type of Content Gets Cited by GeminiAI Overviews in Q1 2026?

Based on Promptwatch data from Jan 1 - Apr 5, 2026. Covers **20,371,054** classified citations. The chart shows the percentage breakdown of citation content types per day. Only citations with a classified content type are included.

### Citation Content Types

- **Listicle**: 26.1%
- **News Article**: 15.3%
- **How-To**: 12.1%
- **Product Page**: 9.7%
- **Landing Page**: 6.2%
- **Social Post**: 4.1%
- **Video**: 3.4%
- **Comparison**: 2.7%

### What this means for you

Across all of Q1 2026, listicles remain the format Google AI Overviews cites most, averaging around 26% of daily citations, well ahead of news articles (~15%) and how-to guides (~12%). The top of the leaderboard didn't change all quarter, but the edges did: listicles drifted down a couple of points from January to early April.

Those points went to video and social. Video citations roughly doubled over the quarter (from ~2.7% to ~5.4% of daily citations) and social posts climbed from ~3.7% to ~5.1%. Google is slowly diversifying AI Overviews beyond classic articles into video and community content.

#### How to act on it

- Keep list-format content at the center of your AI Overviews strategy. Even after a slight decline, listicles still out-earn every other format by a wide margin.
- Start producing (or optimizing) video: its citation share roughly doubled across the quarter, and most brands have no video assets competing for those slots yet.
- Don't write off social platforms for Google visibility: social posts grew from about 3.7% to over 5% of citations, so an active presence in relevant communities now feeds AI Overviews too.

## How we collect this data

We collect millions of prompt responses, citations, and click data from the actual user interfaces of major AI platforms: over 26 billion data points and growing. This gives us one of the largest datasets on how AI search engines cite sources and recommend brands.

### Real UI monitoring

Data straight from the interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews, and more.

### 26B+ data points

Over 26 billion analyzed citations, prompts, and responses, one of the largest AI search datasets available.

### Continuously updated

Refreshed constantly so the trends you see reflect the latest behavior of AI search engines.

### Aggregated & public

Published freely for the GEO community, based on aggregated, non-identifiable trends.