Half the YouTube URLs Google’s AI Overviews cite carry a timestamp pointing at a position inside the video, against 0.6% of the ones ChatGPT cites, according to BrightEdge. Shorts break the same way, at 17.5% of AI Overviews citations and 1.1% of ChatGPT’s, which the study reads as Google hunting for the smallest chunk that answers a question while ChatGPT picks between whole videos. Ecommerce is the category where those citations sit closest to a purchase, with 32.3% of YouTube-citing prompts in AI Overviews at the consideration stage against 3.3% in healthcare. Neither engine can watch a video, so what gets pulled comes down to chapters and a real transcript instead of auto-captions.
