YouTube Appears in 53% of Google AI Overviews for Vitamin and Supplement Searches

Details

Research firm Searcherries monitored 50 vitamin and supplement-related Google queries once daily from August 30 to September 5, 2026, recording 350 AI Overviews and 5,036 citation occurrences across 572 distinct pages and 218 websites. YouTube emerged as the dominant citation source, appearing in 186 answers (53.1%) and across 44 of the 50 queries tracked. Its lead was most pronounced in 'vitamins for' queries, where it appeared in 78.6% of answers. GoodRx ranked second at 48.3%, followed by Healthline (28.6%), Cleveland Clinic (28.0%), and NIH.gov (25.1%). YouTube's citation rate was roughly double that of Healthline despite being a video platform rather than a text-based health authority. A notable finding: 67.6% of AI-cited pages did not appear in the organic search results collected for the same query. When matched by domain rather than exact page, overlap rose to 52.5% — suggesting Google's AI Overviews draw from a substantially different pool than traditional organic rankings, complicating SEO strategy for brands targeting AI Overview visibility. Citation consistency also varied widely by query: some searches cited the same sources every day throughout the study period while others showed high day-to-day turnover, indicating AI Overview citation selection is not uniformly stable across topics.