Be on YouTube

YouTube mentions are the strongest single correlate of AI visibility.

What to do: Get your brand into video titles, descriptions, and transcripts, both your own channel and other people's videos about your category.

Why it works: YouTube mentions are the strongest single correlate of AI visibility anyone has measured, and YouTube is a top source on Google's AI surfaces.

Example: In the same Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions had the highest correlation of any signal at 0.737, against 0.218 for backlinks. YouTube is also the second most-cited domain in Google's AI Overviews.

Walk it through

I ran a real buyer query through Perplexity in July 2026, then ran the same query on YouTube's own search. Here is exactly what came back.

1. Ask Perplexity a real "how to" question in your category.

open "https://www.perplexity.ai/search?q=how+to+connect+zapier+to+google+sheets"

Perplexity answers "how to connect zapier to google sheets" with three video thumbnails up top and youtube citation tags next to four of the steps below

Before the model writes a word of the answer, it shows three video thumbnails pulled straight from YouTube. Then look at the small tags sitting next to the steps: youtube shows up four times, zapier three times. Perplexity is not paraphrasing a help doc here. It is citing a video, by platform name, next to the exact step it pulled from that video.

2. Check the source count.

Sixteen sources fed this one answer, and video results sit at the very top of the page, above every text link. A written article does not get that placement. The video did.

3. Now run the same query on YouTube itself.

open "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+connect+zapier+to+google+sheets"

Every title in the top results is a version of "Integrate Zapier with Google Sheets." None of the three channels here is Zapier. BM Tech Tutorials, AI Mastery, and JimmyRose all rank because they put both brand names in the title, in plain words, in the order a buyer actually types them.

The read

The citation tag tells you the source type, not just the source. Perplexity labeling something youtube instead of the publisher's own domain means the platform carries weight on its own, separate from who uploaded the video.
Third parties outrank the brand's own channel. None of the top YouTube results belong to Zapier. A creator making an unpaid tutorial about your product can out-cite your official docs, because the model is reading the platform, not your org chart.
The title is the entire strategy. Nobody here is doing anything clever. Each creator typed the exact task a buyer searches for into the title, once, and let the platform do the rest.

Steal it

Do not wait for a creator to make the video you need. Pick your single most-searched "how to [task] with [your product]" query, put that exact phrase in the title, and answer it inside the first thirty seconds, since that is the part transcripts and AI summarizers weight hardest. Then find the two or three creators already ranking for that query in your category and treat them like a channel you invest in, not competition: early access, better docs, a real answer when someone asks a question in their comments.

Defending this is the same move as growing it. Pull up your last twenty videos and check whether a competitor's name shows up in your own titles and transcripts more often than it should. If a rival is name-checked inside your tutorial more than your own product is, you just handed them the citation, in your own video, on your own channel.

Gotchas

View count is not the filter that decides YouTube's own ranking. The Easy Guide video in my search sits at 104 views and still ranks second, right above a six-year-old video with 63,000 views. An exact-match title beat both audience size and freshness.
Perplexity's video picks are not static. I ran this same query several times inside an hour and got a different source count and a different mix of videos each time. Treat one screenshot as a sample of the pattern, not a permanent citation, and recheck periodically.
A transcript with your brand name is not automatically a good video. If the tutorial is wrong or out of date, you are now the citation attached to bad advice. Check what is actually ranking for your product name before you go amplify it.