When someone asks ChatGPT today how to fix something or how a new law works, the answer usually doesn't keep them. It points them to a video, most often on YouTube.
This comes from measurements by Similarweb, a web traffic analytics firm. In its ranking of destinations for generative AI traffic, YouTube leads ahead of Facebook in second place and Wikipedia in third, by more than a factor of three. Reddit follows. Roughly three quarters of these visits come from ChatGPT.
“As search moves to AI, video is where people land,” wrote Norris Scott in a post from the YouTube 360 event at Google's New York headquarters.
How much traffic AI redirects
The volume is new. Between June 2025 and May 2026, generative AI platforms sent an average of 770.7 million visits a month, 117% more year on year. What used to end in a blue link in Google results is now split among a growing number of assistants.
And it is no longer about just one of them. ChatGPT's share of generative AI platform traffic fell from roughly 76% in June 2025 to about 53% a year later, while Claude and Gemini are growing. AI traffic is spreading across platforms, but the destination stays the same. When people ask how to do something or how to understand something, the assistant sends them to a tutorial, a comparison or an explainer. Such content most often lives in video, where text in search results can't replace it.
YouTube leads American television too
The second screen confirms this. In July, according to Nielsen, YouTube was the most-watched distributor of American television content with a 14.2% share, five percentage points ahead of NBCU-Versant in second place with 9.2%.
Streaming as a whole accounted for 49% of viewing, driven by the end of the football World Cup, while broadcast came in at 19.5% and cable at 18.7%. We wrote earlier about YouTube's rise onto the TV screen.
Taken together, YouTube occupies two places that until recently had nothing to do with each other: the living room, where people watch, and search, where they arrive from. “The living room belongs to YouTube,” Scott wrote.
Discoverability is moving from the link to the video
This changes the rules of discovery for brands and creators. Being findable used to mean ranking high in text search results. Once an assistant composes the answer and the click-through goes to a video, whether a company or creator is findable depends on whether they have a video at all.
One side of this equation, the supply side, we described earlier. Creators produce reviews, comparisons and tutorials, exactly the material from which AI composes its answers, and tools such as Creator-First AEO help brands get into those answers. The other side is shown by the click-through data itself. When an assistant refers people onward on the basis of such content, it leads them to a video.
A European brand thus runs into a double dependence on one American platform. The monetisation tools YouTube builds for creators and the surface where AI search ends up are held by the same company. Anyone who wants to be seen in ChatGPT's answers today needs a video on YouTube, much as they once needed a position in Google.
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