Most sites cited in UK AI Overviews miss Google's top ten
Data study
A check of 360 everyday UK searches finds that 69.4% of the sites Google's AI Overviews cite are not in the top ten ordinary results beneath them — meaning ranking and being cited are now two separate prizes.
Ask Google on your phone how to bleed a radiator and the first thing you read is no longer a list of links. It is a paragraph Google has written, with a small stack of source cards tucked beside it. Most people never scroll past that paragraph to the ordinary results below.
The working rule for anyone who sells online has been simple: get into the top ten and customers will find you. That rule assumes Google's AI answer draws on the same websites as the results underneath it. Across 360 everyday UK searches checked on mobile in October 2026, it mostly did not. Of the sites the AI Overviews cited, 69.4% were not in the top ten ordinary results for the same search.
The searches cover the ordinary business of life in the UK: shopping, home and DIY, health, money, travel, food, tech, motoring, jobs, legal questions, fashion and property. Each was checked once, on google.co.uk. Google varies what it shows by person, place and moment, so treat every figure here as one snapshot of one panel, picked to cover common kinds of search. The panel is not a random sample of everything Britons type into Google.
AI answers sit on top of most everyday searches
Before asking who gets cited, it helps to know how often there is anything to be cited in. Google showed an AI Overview on 250 of the 360 searches. For any business whose customers search the way this panel does, the AI paragraph is the normal first screen rather than an occasional experiment.
How often it appears depends heavily on what the person is trying to do. Questions and how-to searches almost always got one: 97.1% of them did. Searches with "near me" in them almost never did, at 9.5%.
| Kind of search | Searches checked | Share showing an AI Overview (%) |
|---|---|---|
| How-to and question | 139 | 97.1 |
| Product research | 77 | 74.0 |
| Ready-to-buy | 70 | 72.9 |
| "Near me" | 74 | 9.5 |
Seven in ten cited sites are missing from the top ten
The obvious defence of the old rule is that the AI Overview might simply add a few extra sources on top of the familiar top ten. On that reading, ranking well still gets you in, and the outsiders are a garnish.
The data does not support that comfort. The overviews in this panel leaned on a wide spread of sources, and most of the sites they cited were absent from the ten ordinary results for the same search. "Top ten" here means the first ten unpaid results, leaving out ads, maps and other boxes, captured at the same moment as the overview.
The sharper test is the overview that ignores page one entirely. Nearly one in five AI Overviews, 19.8%, cited no top-ten site at all. In those cases a business could hold the first ordinary result and still be missing from the paragraph the searcher actually reads.
None of this says ranking has stopped mattering. A top-ten place still earns clicks from people who scroll. It says that ranking and being cited are now two separate prizes, and winning the first does not hand you the second.
Video and official sites are cited most often
So where do the citations go? Of the 247 overviews that listed their sources, just over half cited YouTube or TikTok at least once, at 51.4%. That makes video the most-cited of the five groups of sites counted. Official sources came second of the five: a quarter of overviews cited GOV.UK or the NHS, at 25.5%.
| Group of sites | AI Overviews citing it (of 247) | Share (%) |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube and TikTok | 127 | 51.4 |
| GOV.UK and the NHS | 63 | 25.5 |
| Reddit and other forums | 35 | 14.2 |
| Amazon | 14 | 5.7 |
| Wikipedia | 9 | 3.6 |
Data table
| Measure (October 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Searches showing an AI Overview | 250 of 360 (69.4%) |
| How-to and question searches with an AI Overview | 135 of 139 (97.1%) |
| "Near me" searches with an AI Overview | 7 of 74 (9.5%) |
| Cited sites not in the top ten ordinary results | 1,252 of 1,804 (69.4%) |
| AI Overviews citing no top-ten site | 19.8% |
| Overviews citing YouTube and TikTok (of 247) | 127 (51.4%) |
| Overviews citing GOV.UK and the NHS (of 247) | 63 (25.5%) |
| Overviews citing Reddit and other forums (of 247) | 35 (14.2%) |
| Overviews citing Amazon (of 247) | 14 (5.7%) |
| Overviews citing Wikipedia (of 247) | 9 (3.6%) |
| Most-cited single site of 1,007 cited: youtube.com | 126 (51%) |
| Second of 1,007: google.com | 44 (17.8%) |
| Third of 1,007: gov.uk | 41 (16.6%) |
| Topic with highest AI Overview share of the 12: Money & finance (indicative) | 26 of 30 (86.7%) |
| Topic with lowest AI Overview share of the 12: Home services & property (indicative) | 18 of 30 (60%) |
| .uk sites blocking at least one AI crawler | 514 of 4,377 (11.7%) |
| Most-blocked of 11 AI crawlers: GPTBot | 9.1% |
| Least-blocked of 11 AI crawlers: Claude-SearchBot | 4.8% |
| Blocking at least one AI search crawler | 7% |
| Blocking ChatGPT's user-triggered fetcher | 5.4% |
| Global top 100,000 .uk sites blocking at least one AI crawler | 132 of 648 (20.4%) |
| .uk sites ranked 100,001 to 500,000 blocking at least one | 382 of 3,729 (10.2%) |
| .uk sites publishing an llms.txt | 775 of 4,377 (17.7%) |
| Of those, the same generated template | 451 (58.2%) |
Forums such as Reddit appeared in 14.2% of overviews, Amazon in 5.7% and Wikipedia in 3.6%, the lowest of the five groups. These are counts of how often a group was cited, which is a measure of where Google looked. Being cited is not the same as being trusted by readers, and it says nothing about sales.
The picture is of an AI answer that reaches for a demonstration video, an official page and somebody's forum thread, then writes its own summary across them. A retailer's well-optimised product page can sit at the top of the ordinary results while the paragraph above it quotes a how-to clip instead.
Local searches still play by the old rules
One kind of search breaks the pattern. When someone types "near me", the AI paragraph rarely appears at all, as the earlier table shows. For a plumber, a café or a hairdresser, the fight for those searches still happens in the familiar results and the map, where the top ten keeps its old meaning.
How the old rule fares against the data
Set the received wisdom against each part of the panel and it weakens at every step. AI Overviews appear on most everyday searches, and on nearly every question. When they appear, they mostly cite sites from outside the top ten, and sometimes none from inside it. The sources they favour are video, official pages and forums. Only the local "near me" search still looks the way it used to.
What this means for UK businesses
Treat ranking and citation as two jobs. A top-ten place is still worth having, but it does not guarantee a mention in the AI answer above it. Check both for the searches that matter to you.
Answer the question in plain words. The overviews appeared most often on how-to and question searches. Pages that state a clear answer near the top, in everyday language, give the AI something to cite.
Think beyond your own website. Video, official guidance and forum threads were cited often. A short how-to video or a helpful reply in a relevant community can put your expertise where the AI is already looking.
Local businesses can keep their focus. "Near me" searches rarely showed an AI Overview in this check, so your map listing, reviews and ordinary ranking remain the main event.
Check again. Results change by person, place and moment. One look is a snapshot; a regular check of the same searches tells you far more.
The paragraph at the top of the screen now decides which names a searcher sees first. On this evidence, it is choosing many of them from outside the top ten.
How we built it
This analysis covers a fixed panel of 360 everyday UK Google searches, about 30 in each of twelve topics, sorted into four kinds of search: how-to and question (139), product research (77), ready-to-buy (70) and "near me" (74). Each search was checked once in October 2026, on mobile results from google.co.uk. Google personalises and varies results, so a single check is a snapshot rather than every user's view, and the panel was chosen to cover common kinds of search rather than drawn at random from all UK searches.
For each search we recorded whether an AI Overview appeared, which sites it cited, and the first ten organic (unpaid, non-feature) results on the same check. A cited site counts as "not in the top ten" if it did not appear among those ten. Of 1,804 cited sites across the overviews, 1,252 fell outside the top ten. Site-group shares use the 247 overviews that listed sources. The difference in how often overviews appeared on how-to versus "near me" searches is far larger than chance would produce at these sample sizes. Topic-level figures rest on about 30 searches each and are indicative only.
A separate check fetched the robots.txt and llms.txt files directly from every .uk website in the Chrome UX Report's top 500,000 (site list from the HTTP Archive crawl); 4,377 of 5,026 answered. "Blocks" means a crawler is disallowed from the whole site. robots.txt is a request, not enforcement. These crawler figures appear in the table below for reference.
