YouTube Dominates Google AI Overviews in Health Supplement Searches

Video content from YouTube has become the dominant source cited by Google's artificial intelligence summaries when users search for information about vitamins and supplements. In a recent study tracking health-related searches, the platform surfaced in 186 out of 350 AI-generated overviews—representing 53.1% of all answers examined. This made YouTube the sole website to appear in more than half of the collected responses.

Researchers at Searcherries conducted the analysis by monitoring 50 daily searches from August 30 to September 5, 2026. The search queries, sourced from Google's autocomplete suggestions, focused on wellness topics spanning hair growth, energy levels, sleep quality, anxiety management, and weight reduction. Each search query triggered Google's AI Overview feature, which displays an artificially generated summary at the top of search results.

The ranking of most-cited sources revealed a significant gap between YouTube and its competitors. GoodRx secured the second position with appearances in 48.3% of answers. Healthline followed at 28.6%, Cleveland Clinic at 28.0%, and the National Institutes of Health's nih.gov domain at 25.1%. The methodology counted each website only once per answer, regardless of how many pages from that site were referenced.

YouTube's influence extended across the vast majority of the test queries, appearing in 44 of the 50 searches examined. The platform showed particularly strong performance in searches beginning with "vitamins for," where it appeared in 78.6% of the AI-generated answers. Across all queries tested, YouTube citations occurred nearly twice as frequently as those from Healthline.

An important finding emerged regarding the relationship between AI citations and traditional search results. The analysis discovered that AI Overviews frequently referenced pages that did not appear in the organic search results for the same query. Only 32.4% of pages cited by the AI system showed up in the recorded organic listings; the remaining 67.6% were absent. When the comparison shifted to website-level matching rather than exact page matching, the overlap increased to 52.5%, indicating that the AI sometimes cited different pages from websites already visible in organic search.

Citation patterns varied considerably across individual queries. For the search "supplements for weight loss," nih.gov appeared consistently every day of the study period, while YouTube showed up on six of the seven days tracked. Other sources fluctuated in and out of the results. In contrast, searches for "supplements to help with glp-1 side effects" produced identical cited pages throughout the entire week.

About the research

The study tracked a consistent group of 50 Google Autocomplete queries, with one search performed daily using US English settings on desktop browsers configured for New York location. The dataset encompassed 350 AI Overviews containing 5,036 total citation instances across 572 unique pages from 218 different websites. Organic search overlap calculations were performed individually for each query, counting repeated references to the same page only once; the organic search results recorded for each query contained between seven and ten listings.