Wikipedia and news sites win most Gemini citations
A large look at how Google's AI assistant picks the sources it credits.
Wikipedia and news sites get credited most often when Google's AI assistant Gemini answers a question, according to a study shared by Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe). The study looked at 222,753 Google searches across 76,450 public conversations.
YouTube came out differently. Gemini reads YouTube but rarely cites it, so a video can feed an answer without your channel getting a visible mention.
Gemini rewrites your question before it searches
The study also found that Gemini sorts your question into categories, then expands it before it searches. That means the search it actually runs is not the exact wording you typed. The sources it ends up citing are chosen against that expanded version, not your original phrasing.
One more finding matters for anyone tracking where AI answers come from. Gemini can search without displaying any sources at all. So some answers draw on pages that never show up as a citation (a visible link crediting where the information came from).
What this means for your site
If you have been trying to work out why your pages are not named in AI answers, this is a partial explanation. Big reference and news sites are taking a large share of the visible credit, and some searches hand out no credit to anyone.
There is nothing here that says your site is broken or that Google has changed a ranking rule. It is one study of how one assistant behaves. Treat it as a picture of the current odds, not as instructions.
The practical step is small. If you publish videos, do not count on YouTube citations to bring you AI visibility, and put the same information on a page on your own site where it can be cited. Write the answer to the question plainly, because Gemini is matching against an expanded version of what a person asked, not a single keyword.
And if you report on AI traffic, remember that some Gemini searches show no sources. The number of times you get cited will understate how often your content was actually read.
Wikipedia and news sites lead the citations, YouTube is read but rarely cited
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