YouTube has become increasingly focused on AI visibility strategies, prompting marketing leaders to shift efforts to video content.
Data worth paying attention to
In 2025, BrightEdge data showed that YouTube appears in 29.5% of AI overviews on average, slow sources like Reddit, which many brands have prioritized as their main way to influence LLM results.
That influence is already growing rapidly. When we recently assessed the presence of AI for a business client, YouTube was named as the primary source for nearly 60% of their branded queries, reinforcing that AI systems are highly dependent on video content.
This marks a logical change. In the past year, marketing teams have focused more on user-generated reviews and platform content to influence AI responses. Now, video content, especially on YouTube, is emerging as a key driver. I recently spoke with Digiday about this change and what it means for products.
Why YouTube, and why now
The reason YouTube is so valuable for LLMs is because of the structure. Unlike most social media platforms, most content within YouTube is machine-readable. Transcripts, metadata, chapters, timestamps, descriptions: all give LLMs a clean, organized text to extract and cite.
This is an important distinction that most marketers miss. LLMs do not “watch” your videos. They read them. Specifically, they read scriptures. That means words are spoken on video like they never did when YouTube was a spectator sport. Every sentence in a video script is now a source of AI-generated feedback.
That changes the calculus. A plain, non-scripted video may generate strong view counts but offers very little LLMs to cite. A well-structured, information-dense video with clear answers to common questions gives them something concrete to work with. Engagement still matters: view time, likes, and comments all influence how LLMs evaluate authority and relevance. But without a clear, well-defined script underneath, that engagement won’t translate into AI visibility.
Scripts Have Become Strategic Search Assets
Because LLMs successfully import transcripts, we use techniques that prioritize natural language development of video scripts and technical metadata. This is not about keyword typing or gaming the system. It is about being intentional about how information is structured and delivered; making sure that brand names, product identifiers, and specific use cases are clearly defined rather than visually implied.
We also analyze our competitors’ embedded texts from YouTube content, which we visualize in a 3D map. This allows us to see similarities and distributions between our competitor’s content, current content, and potential content ideas. It’s a way to identify where there are gaps in the information space that a product can fill, and where competitors already have the writing layer.
Practical implication: brands should build their YouTube presence with a variety of videos that cover different angles, use cases, and questions related to their category. The goal is not just to be seen. It ensures that when an LLM goes looking for information about your product or space, they find your content, read your transcript, and cite your product.
Content Creators Now Contribute to Long Term Search Visibility
This is where it gets interesting for brands investing in influencer and creator partnerships on YouTube.
LLM browsers filter standard ad units. A pre-roll ad will have no effect on what ChatGPT tells someone about your product. But they rely heavily on live narration within the video transcript. And because brand partnerships within a creator’s video don’t appear in the video’s metadata, there’s a real chance that creator content talking about your brand can be accessed and cited by LLMs as creative content.
The good news for the SEO world is that a brand partnership or sponsored video creator is no longer just a social media strategy. It is now a strategic SEO asset.
This reframes the entire value proposition of YouTube’s creator partnership. We advise clients to treat creators’ documents as searchable copy and embed key product identifiers in the language creators use when discussing their products. Not in a heavy-handed way that undermines the author’s authenticity, but with enough clarity that LLMs can extract important, causal information from that text.
A creator who says “I’ve been using this for a few weeks and really like it” is very important to LLM. The creator of “I was using [Brand X]’s [specific product] for [specific use case] and here’s what I found” gives the LLM something concrete to work with. That specificity is what turns the creator’s claim into an AI quote.
An important point
YouTube’s strategy can no longer be limited to social or product groups. It needs to be part of the AI visibility conversation, sitting alongside traditional SEO, earned media, and review platforms.
The products that go first here will have a combined profit. AI models are trained on the content available today. The transcripts and metadata products posted on YouTube now will change the way LLMs are represented for months and years to come.
