By Sam Bradley  •  February 25, 2026  •

Ivy Liu

“In the past month, it’s become clear that YouTube is now outpacing Reddit in terms of citations,” said Christine Schrader, vp of strategic innovation at Wpromote.

That means marketers need to think hard about their presence on the video platform at least as much as how they’re talked about in a subreddit community.

“The ‘why’ is simple: YouTube is highly machine-readable (transcripts, metadata, chapters) and tends to be a low-risk source for AI to summarize and cite,” said Ómar Thor Ómarsson, CEO and co-founder at Optise, a company that provides B2B advertisers with a generative AI tool designed to improve the organic search performance of their websites and digital presence.

Pivot to video

“YouTube is now a ranking asset in AI discovery, and you can lose share even if website traffic looks stable,” Ómarsson noted.

Marketers have steadily increased their spending on YouTube in recent years; in 2025, its revenues exceeded $60 billion. But as a consequence of the LLM shift, marketers are rethinking harder about their organic presence on the platform.

According to Jessica Finch, head of SEO at Brainlabs, “YouTube has evolved from a pure social channel play into a major focus for AI visibility strategies.” 

Finch said that a recent audit carried out for an unnamed enterprise client found YouTube cited as a primary source almost 60% of the time in AI Overviews, double the BrightEdge average. Absence from the platform, she said, was no longer an option.

What can brands actually do?

There’s a decent overlap between best practice organic strategy on YouTube and an LLM-friendly one. Longer-form videos, posted frequently and tagged correctly, are going to be rated well by an LLM crawler – just as they will by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and, indeed, viewers.

Jack Smyth, country lead for Brandtch in Australia, told Digiday that his company’s research found LLMs favoring videos with fewer than 100,000 views, that landed in the 10-20 minute range, and which had titles with 8-12 words.

“We’ve watched YouTube progressively rise to become the most important platform for [a] brand’s share of model,” he said in an email. Videos containing “information density”, and answers to popular questions were cited more often than general content, he added.

Brands without an established presence should aim to flesh out their YouTube presence with a large range of videos covering different angles on a given topic. Marketers hoping to improve the way LLMs represent a product, for example, might consider uploading many videos discussing its different user cases, said Rishabh Jain, co-founder and CEO of Fermat, a company that provides firms with software tracking their zero-click search performance. 

“You want to talk about every variant use case, so that way the LLM can go and retrieve that from that place and then cite that particular source,” he said.

And because it’s the transcripts of videos that are being digested by LLMs, marketers need to pay attention to their words. Video scripts can be a means of altering their share of model, and of analyzing rivals, said Brainlabs’ Finch.

“Because LLMs effectively ‘ingest’ transcripts, we are implementing remedies that prioritize natural language optimization in video scripts and technical metadata,” she said. “We have clients where we analyze competitor text embeddings from YouTube content, which we visualize in a [3D visualization]. This allows us to see similarities and distribution between competitor content, current content, and potential content ideas.”

Headphones manufacturer JBL, for example, recently overhauled its organic social strategic (YouTube included) in part to better suit LLM data trends, explained Carolina González, senior specialist in brand management at JBL parent company Harman. The aim, she said, was to “start being attractive not only for LLMs but for social media.”

What about YouTubers?

SEO and media experts know that LLM crawlers will ignore paid media content, meaning there’s little chance an outright ad can be used to influence ChatGPT. That isn’t necessarily the case for creators, however. 

Because a partnership with a YouTube influencer during a video doesn’t have to show up in the video’s metadata, there’s a decent chance YouTubers with brand deals could be acting as LLM sources.

“LLM crawlers do filter out standard ad units, but they will rely heavily on the organic narrative within a video’s transcript,” explained Finch. “The good news for the world of SEO is that a brand partnership or a sponsored creator video is no longer just a social brand tactic. It’s now a strategic SEO asset.”

As such, she said Brainlabs was advising clients to treat scripts as search copy and embed “key brand identifiers” into creator scripts on YouTube.

The conclusion: for marketers hoping to influence LLMs, creator partnerships could be as powerful a lever as a brand’s own video content.