Independent Blogs Get 1% of AI Overview Citations. Here’s How a Small Business Gets Cited Anyway

I read Lilach Bullock’s new AI Overviews study twice, and my first reaction was a small, dumb panic. Independent blogs get cited in about 1% of Google’s AI answers? I write a blog. Great.

Then I read the method section, and the panic turned into something more useful. The number is real. The takeaway for a small business just isn’t the one in the headline.

Quick context if you missed the earlier posts: I checked whether Google’s AI and ChatGPT cite my own site (19 times and zero, respectively, ouch), and then wrote a five-minute self-check so you can do the same for your business. This is the data-driven sequel. What does a bigger dataset say, and what do you do with it?

What the study actually found

In September, Bullock published a 300-query study. She took the 300 highest-impression non-branded searches on her own site, all about small business social media and marketing, and checked the live US desktop Google results for each on September 10, 2026.

Here’s what came back:

• 93% had an AI Overview. That’s 280 of the 300 searches.
• The average Overview cites 5.4 sources, and the same 25 domains account for most of those citations.
• YouTube is cited in 57% of the Overviews. Reddit is next at 20%.
• Independent blogs show up in roughly 1%. She includes her own blog in that.
• Page-one rankings earn far less under an Overview. On her site, positions 7 to 10 got a 1.7% click-through rate, and positions 4 to 6 got 0.7%.

That’s a lot of Google’s answer box handed to video and forums.

Before you panic (or screenshot it for your boss)

Read the fine print, because I’d rather you hear it from me than from the one guy in your LinkedIn feed who treats every study as gospel.

This is one marketer’s queries, taken from one site, on one day, in one country, on desktop. Bullock says so herself: “a single-site, single-day snapshot.” The topics skew toward Instagram, backlinks, and social media tools. That’s a different neighborhood from “emergency plumber in Pasadena” or “accountant for nonprofits.”

And the click-through numbers are her site’s experience, not a market average.

So don’t read it as “blogs are dead.” Read it as a very good look at what Google’s AI reaches for when the question is a how-to in a crowded, software-heavy topic. That’s still useful, because a lot of small business marketing questions look exactly like that.

The pattern hiding in the citation list

The domain list is the interesting part. Past YouTube and Reddit, you’ve got Semrush, Instagram, Quora, Ahrefs, Zapier, Google’s own support pages, and Square’s site.

Look at who those are. Mostly the company that makes the thing, answering questions about its own thing. Bullock notes that on anything with a commercial angle, the sources are the software vendors’ own help centers and blogs, not the reviewers who compare them.

That’s the lesson I’d steal. The AI reaches for the primary source. The place where someone actually did the thing, or actually makes the thing, or actually answers to the customer.

For a small business, you are the primary source on a short list of topics: what you charge, where you work, how your process goes, what happens when something goes wrong. A review site is not.

What I’d do with this at small-business scale

None of this needs a budget. It needs a couple of afternoons.

1. Find out which of your questions get an AI answer at all. Search your three or four buyer questions in Google. Some will have an Overview, some won’t. The ones that don’t are where clicks still live, so know which are which before you spend effort. The self-check walks through it.
2. Answer the question in the first paragraph. Bullock’s advice, and it matches what I said last month about question-shaped headings. Put the plain answer right under the heading so it can be lifted as-is. Don’t make anyone read three paragraphs of warm-up.
3. Be the primary source on your own numbers. Pricing ranges, service areas, timelines, what’s included. If a vendor’s help center can win a citation by documenting its own product, you can win some by documenting your own business, in plain language, on a page.
4. Make a short video of your best answer. YouTube is 57% of citations in this set. You don’t need a studio. A phone and two minutes on “how do I tell if my roof needs replacing” or “what does a website audit cover” is a real asset.
5. Show up where the conversation is. Reddit at 20% is hard to ignore. Answer actual questions in your niche’s threads with specifics, not a pitch.
6. Pick questions an AI answers badly. Local, current, and “who should I call” questions need a real business with a real address. Make that page excellent.

If you want help working out which of those matters most for your business, that’s what our AI SEO work starts with, and the free AI visibility snapshot is the lighter first step.

So, is a small business doomed?

No. But “rank number one for a broad how-to” is a worse plan than it used to be, and it was never a great plan for a local business.

The question I’d ask instead: when someone asks the specific question that leads to your door, are you the source the answer is built from? Or is a software vendor’s help center standing in for you?

If you try any of the six above, I’d love to hear what you see. Did the Overview change? Did anything start citing you? Come tell me.