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AI platforms cite YouTube constantly, and a video citation behaves nothing like an article citation: it points at a creator, not a publisher. Social → YouTube breaks that slice of your citations out on its own, so you can see which channels the models trust in your category.

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How the data is collected

Whenever a tracked AI response cites a URL, MentionLab checks whether it is a YouTube link (/watch?v=, /shorts/, /embed/, or a youtu.be short link). Matching videos are resolved through the YouTube Data API, and a metadata snapshot of the video and its channel is stored.
Metadata is snapshotted at most once per day. Titles, view counts, subscriber counts and channel countries reflect the most recent snapshot, not the moment the citation happened.

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Headline numbers

Channel countries excludes channels with no country set, while the By Country table includes them as an “Unknown” row — so the table can have one more row than this card suggests.

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YouTube Channel Share

A donut of citation share by channel — top 10 plus Other.

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Channel share over time

The proportion of responses citing each of the top five channels, bucketed Daily / Weekly / Monthly.

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By Country

Grouped by the cited channel’s home country: Click a row for the country sheet: top channels and top videos from that market.
Citation Share can sum to more than 100% down these tables. One AI response often cites several videos, from several channels, in several countries — and it counts once for each. Every individual row is still ≤ 100%.
Two different countries are in play. The Countries filter in the filter bar scopes by the market your query targeted. The By Country table groups by the channel’s home country. They’re independent, and combining them is often the interesting move — e.g. which foreign channels dominate answers in your home market.

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All Channels

Every channel whose videos were cited, with citation rate, citation share, subscriber count and country. Click a row for the channel sheet listing its cited videos.
Citations and Cited videos are hidden by default here — turn them on with the column-visibility button.

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All Videos

Every cited video, with its thumbnail, upload date, view/like/comment counts, channel, citation rate and citation share. Search by title to check whether a specific video was ever cited. Expand a row for Citing queries — which of your queries produced responses citing that video, and how many times each.
The Queries column is hidden by default on this table.

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Reading the results

  • A channel with high citation share and no relationship to you is an outreach target.
  • Videos cited across many different queries are category-defining content — worth understanding, and worth having an answer to.
  • The By Country split tells you whether the models lean on local creators or on a few global channels, which changes how you’d approach it entirely.
View as has no effect on this page — citations belong to a response, not a brand.