It seems like everyone these days is buzzing about AI Overviews. To get your brand cited in that coveted Google real estate is the new barometer of SEO success. But, for all the talk about SEO for AI Overviews, one powerful strategy is often overlooked: optimizing YouTube videos for AI algorithms.
YouTube is the most cited domain in AI Overviews, accounting for nearly 30% of all citations according to a study by BrightEdge released this month. Google itself said in our recent Executive Growth Summit that YouTube and Reddit are the two most cited sources in AI overviews, and a study by Profound this summer backed that up. To stay relevant in the ever-changing world of SEO, businesses must not only create quality video content, they must optimize that content for AI Overviews.
Why YouTube SEO for AI Overviews Matters
YouTube is owned by Google. It is also the world’s second-largest search engine, behind only Google itself. It only makes sense, then, that optimizing YouTube videos according to Google’s ranking factors will help your brand become more visible in AI Overviews.
As Search Engine Land’s Danny Goodwin said, “Google continues to give preference to videos from its YouTube platform – especially for visual demonstrations, step-by-step tutorials, and product comparisons. If you want to be visible in AI Overviews, you may want to align your YouTube and SEO strategies so your videos are cited in AI Overviews.”
For certain industries and video types, optimizing for AI Overviews is especially critical. You’ll frequently find AI Overview YouTube results for topics including:
- How-to’s
- Product reviews
- Tutorials
- Anything related to finance, software, health, sports, or fitness
Why are AI Overviews increasingly showing YouTube results? It boils down to the messaging power of video content.
Advantages of Video Content
- Visual Proof: Seeing is believing, and video is the perfect platform for conveying visually driven messages, like those in how-to tutorials and product demonstrations.
- Short Format: For search queries such as Q&As and product reviews, a quick video can often satisfy user intent better than a lengthy article.
- Trust Signals: Google values engagement, and YouTube offers plenty of opportunities to signal high-quality content via views, comments, likes, and shares.
- All-in-One Source: Video offers a plethora of data for AI to scrape, including transcripts, subtitles, images, and more – all in a single, convenient source.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos for AI Overviews
Clearly, YouTube videos carry a lot of weight with AI Overviews. The question, then, is how do you get your brand to show up? Luckily, many of the same elements of optimizing YouTube videos for SEO apply to optimizing for AI Overviews. Creating helpful content with an emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a great place to start. Implementing tags, categories, and subtitles further increases discoverability, both for traditional Google search and for AI Overviews.
But to get YouTube videos cited in AI Overviews, brands must go beyond traditional SEO best practices. They must focus their YouTube strategy on the engagement elements and content structure that AI prioritizes. Let’s break down what separates a YouTube video that ranks for traditional search vs. one that gets picked up by AI Overviews.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos for Traditional Search
- Video Titles: These should be clear, informative, and descriptive.
- Descriptions: Use the Research tab in YouTube Analytics to identify popular search terms and create keyword-rich video descriptions.
- Tags: Adding relevant tags helps to properly categorize your content.
- Subtitles and Captions: Using target keywords in on-screen text helps Google more easily discover and parse your videos.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos for AI Overviews
- Video Descriptions: Front-load key details in the first sentence so AI can more easily scrape essential information.
- Captions: Don’t rely on YouTube’s auto-generated video captions, which are generally only 60-70% accurate. Instead, use SRT files to extract subtitles and their timings from video. They are more accurate and higher quality, improving your video’s discoverability.
- Timestamps & Chapters: Help AI better summarize your YouTube videos by breaking them into logical and digestible sections via chapters and timestamps.
- Branding: Build authority and trustworthiness through consistent branding in your YouTube videos. The more cohesive your brand is, the more credible you become as a source for AI algorithms.
- Related Content: Clustering related videos together helps build topical authority for your brand. You can do this by creating a playlist or simply by linking to relevant videos in your YouTube video descriptions.
- Schema: Ensure AI systems can understand your video content by adding schema markup, including VideoObject schema, timestamp markup, and organization markup.
JumpFly’s founding partner, Brad Garlin, recently tested these tactics with a YouTube short video that included naturally spoken phrases, a descriptive title, and keyword-rich captions written with AI Overviews in mind.
Lo and behold, it worked! As of the writing of this post, that video is featured in AI Overviews, as well as being the top traditional search result:
“When YouTube videos are optimized for AI Overviews, they don’t just earn views; they earn authority. Appearing in AI-generated responses signals trust and expertise, giving brands visibility that feels more like a recommendation than a ranking,”
Brad Garlin, JumpFly Founding Partner
Optimize for AI Overviews: YouTube Accounts & Channels
Optimizing your YouTube videos for AI crawlers is only one piece of the puzzle. To fully harness the potential of YouTube content for AI Overviews, brands need to take a more holistic approach, reviewing both their YouTube account and their channel.
How to Optimize Your YouTube Brand Account
- Customize your YouTube account with your brand name, URL, logo, and banner. This helps position your brand as a valuable and trustworthy resource.
- Create an authoritative company bio with relevant keywords. Include any statistics or data that can add to your credibility.
- Add links back to your website and other social media channels.
- Set default upload settings in your YouTube account settings, including titles, tags, and descriptions, so that you never miss an optimization opportunity.
How to Optimize Your YouTube Channel
- Create video playlists centered around core topics. Playlists help demonstrate topical authority and increase user engagement, both of which are important for AI optimization. The structure of YouTube playlists, similar to content topic clustering, also helps AI more easily find and display answers for sub-topics on more general themes.
- Set a channel trailer. Creating an SEO optimized trailer helps establish branding and authority, sending positive quality signals to Googlebot and increasing your YouTube videos’ chances of getting featured in AI Overviews.
- Organize your channel homepage with the most recent content front and center. When viewers see your latest videos first, it increases the relevancy and value of your channel as a whole.
- Post with consistency. Not only should you upload videos regularly (don’t leave viewers hanging!), you should also have cohesive messaging across all of your videos. Keeping your tone and terminology consistent improves your brand’s overall trustworthiness.
Video Content Ideas for AI Overviews
To optimize YouTube videos for AI overviews, you need to think about your content strategically. Successful video ideas for AI Overviews can be found using:
- Google’s People Also Ask feature
- Trending YouTube searches
- Top-performing site content
- Underperforming site content
It makes sense that taking your most popular informational articles and synthesizing them into short YouTube videos works beautifully. On the flip side, you can also score YouTube wins with some of your past written articles that may have missed the mark. Review your analytics for pages that underperformed because the SERP was dominated by video content. This is your opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade with an AI Overview-focused YouTube video.
You can also find YouTube content ideas by thinking about visual-oriented topics. Create videos that are more likely to be cited in AI Overviews by focusing on:
- Product demos (“How XYZ works”)
- Product use cases (“When to use XYZ” or “Products best for”)
- Solutions to problems (“How to XYZ”)
- Relaying complex or technical information (“What is” or “How does”)
- Comparison queries (“Difference between XYZ and XYZ”)
Putting It All Together: Mastering YouTube SEO in the Age of AI
AI Overviews aren’t going anywhere, and brands that ignore optimizing content for this premium real estate will be left behind. While there are many ways to optimize for AI Overviews, arguably one of the most powerful tools is YouTube SEO. With strategic planning and focused execution, your brand’s YouTube videos can get cited by AI Overviews, helping you stand apart from the competition.
