ChatGPT is citing YouTube 91% less than in August
Big domains are showing up far less often in the sources ChatGPT lists under its answers.
YouTube has lost 91% of its share of ChatGPT citations compared with August, according to analysis posted by David Konitzny (@davidkonitzny). Citations are the source links ChatGPT shows under an answer. Other big names fell too. Facebook is down 88.1%, Wikipedia down 78.4% and Forbes down 71.7%.
It is not just a share effect
A drop in share can be misleading. If ChatGPT starts citing far more sites overall, any one site loses share even when its own numbers hold steady. Konitzny says he checked for that. He indexed YouTube's actual citation volume against July as a baseline, and says the fall shows up there as well.
He also draws a line between being found and being credited. These sites can still be pulled in and used while ChatGPT works on an answer. They are just making it into the final list of cited sources much less often.
The analysis is based on hundreds of thousands of branded and non-branded prompts tracked over time, so it is not a handful of hand-typed test questions. It is still one person's data set, and nobody has said why the numbers moved. Konitzny ends his post asking the same question.
What it means for your site
If you have been putting effort into YouTube or big platform pages partly because they got quoted back inside AI answers, that route looks much thinner than it did a month ago. Konitzny's point is narrower than "these sites do not matter anymore", so do not throw out a channel that brings you actual viewers or customers.
If you track ChatGPT mentions with a tool, open it and look at the raw number of citations from each domain over the past few days, not the percentage share. That is the check Konitzny suggests people run against their own data. If you do not track ChatGPT at all, there is nothing to do here today.
YouTube isn’t just getting diluted by a larger citation pool. ChatGPT is actually citing YouTube substantially less often than it did in August.