Research from marketing agency Jellyfish, first shared with Adweek, found that more than a quarter of AI chatbot answers point to videos made by YouTube creators.
The agency counted over a million unique YouTube videos cited each day in the US in the consumer packaged goods category alone. In some areas, such as consumer electronics and finance, close to half of answers draw on creator videos. The pattern held across Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Perplexity.
YouTube overtook Reddit as chatbots' top referral destination by early 2026, helped by features such as threaded comments that make its pages easier for models to read. Chatbots reportedly favour niche creators with videos over 10 minutes long, which Tubefilter reads as a possible boost for long-form channels after years in which Shorts pulled attention to brief clips.
The finding sharpens a long-running dispute. Creators including Marques Brownlee have campaigned against unlicensed scraping, and a class action this year accuses Amazon, Apple and OpenAI of getting around YouTube's restrictions to gather training data. YouTube has made opting out easier, but many videos still feed models, and it is unclear how many cited channels agreed to it.
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