Google cites social networks in its AI answers. ChatGPT almost never does.

Google and ChatGPT do not draw on the same sources when they answer: a Minddex study published on October 16, 2026 measured that 65.0% of sourced Google AI Overviews answers cite at least one social network, against 3.5% of ChatGPT answers, across 151,718 answers generated in France between August 27 and September 25, 2026.

What did the Minddex GEO Social 2026 study actually measure?

The GEO Social 2026 study, authored by Thibaut Fitoussi and published by Minddex on October 16, 2026, put identical questions to ChatGPT and to Google AI Overviews over one month, in France, across 32 sectors. The corpus holds 151,718 answers, 139,245 of which cite at least one source, for 1,842,720 citations in total. Of those citations, 90,846 point to a social network, or 4.93% of the whole. Minddex sells AI visibility tooling: the method is published and detailed, it remains a vendor study, and its authors state plainly that the results are descriptive and are not evidence of causation.

Why is the gap between the two engines so wide?

Social networks account for 18.85% of the sources cited by Google AI Overviews and 0.41% of those cited by ChatGPT, according to the Minddex study of October 16, 2026. On AI Overviews, YouTube appears in 49.46% of answers that cite content, Facebook in 20.81%, Instagram in 10.25% and Reddit in 8.58%. On ChatGPT the ranking inverts and the volume collapses: Reddit 1.62%, LinkedIn 1.20%, YouTube 0.64%.

The most revealing number in the Minddex study is not a volume gap, it is a library gap. Abondance, which worked through the study PDF on October 21, 2026, reports that only 130 social URLs are cited by both engines, out of the 61,868 social URLs cited by Google AI Overviews and the 4,851 cited by ChatGPT. The two engines are not reading the same shelf.

What does this change for a small or mid-sized business?

Three consequences land directly on any company trying to find out where it stands.

• A single AI visibility score adds together two bodies of sources that barely overlap. An aggregate number can rise because Google cited a video in your sector, while ChatGPT has never once encountered your company name.
• Inside a Google answer, the visible source for your market is often content you do not own: YouTube led the cited networks in all 32 sectors Minddex studied.
• Inside ChatGPT, the social playing field shrinks to Reddit and LinkedIn, and even there to under 2% of answers that cite content. What matters is web pages, including yours.

For a shop, a trade business or a professional practice, the useful reading fits in one sentence: your own site is the only asset that counts on both engines. A social profile can perform on one and stay invisible on the other, while a page that answers a question clearly stays eligible everywhere. We made the same argument in "ChatGPT is citing YouTube and Facebook far less. The lesson is about what you do not own."

Why does rank tracking show none of this?

Because a citation inside an AI answer is not a position in the classic results. Minddex states that rank tracking does not measure AI Overviews citations on any platform, and that for video it misses the video module and the inline markers where those citations appear. Abondance reports from the study that only 7.8% of the YouTube URLs cited by Google AI Overviews also appear in the classic results for the same query, against 77.8% for Reddit.

English-language measurement points the same way, and on a far larger sample. Ahrefs, across 863,000 result pages and 4 million AI Overviews URLs, measured on March 2, 2026 that 37.9% of cited URLs also appear in the first ten blocks for the same query, against roughly 76% in its July 2025 study. Ahrefs notes that its parser improved between the two measurements, so the comparison is not method-constant. In that same dataset, among cited pages that do not rank in Google's top 100 results, 18.2% are YouTube URLs.

Should you start making videos to get cited?

Not as a matter of principle, and rarely first. The Minddex study measures citation presence, not revenue effect, and its authors say so. Three situations where producing video would be the wrong call: your site has nothing citable yet, and a video will not stand in for a page that answers the question; your customers look for you inside ChatGPT, where social accounts for 0.41% of cited sources; your sector sits at the low end of social presence, around 23.0% of answers for business services against 37.6% for video games and esports. Launching a YouTube channel while your home page is unreadable to a crawler is buying an audience for a closed shop.

The same caution applies to measurement. A before-and-after screenshot proves nothing: Minddex recommends matched pairs, a hypothesis registered in advance, one variable changed and repeated prompts. That is the argument we set out in "Asking ChatGPT whether it knows you measures nothing".