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Free check · 6 items · 4 minutes

Is your video budget buying rankings or citations?

On most video results pages the platform owner holds the top slots and is not going to hand them over. This check tells you which objective your estate can actually buy — and refuses to score the rest if you never took a baseline.

6 items Baseline gate Channel decision separated No email

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The Video Citation Audit

Item 7 is the one we failed. If you did not baseline before your last change, this check will say so rather than scoring around it.

Item 1

Can you name the domains cited in AI answers for your category's questions, and say how many of them you own?

If a platform you do not control is in your top five, that is a channel decision with its own budget line.

Item 2

Have you read your own video pages as a stranger would, and written down what the cohort implies about the company?

A cohort can read as an agency signal even when each page is fine.

Item 3

Is every video asset briefed as either a ranking asset or a citation asset, decided per asset before scripting?

Not both. The two objectives want different assets.

Item 4

Does every asset you want quoted carry video schema and a real, published transcript?

A transcript nobody can fetch is not a transcript.

Item 5

Have you applied the extraction test — does a transcript sentence containing a number still mean something on its own?

Sentences that need their neighbours do not survive extraction.

Item 6

Did you record a baseline before your last change to the video estate, and is the review scheduled at 45 days?

This is the item we failed. Without a baseline there is no outcome to report.

Your citation panel (optional)

The first two decide whether this is a content brief or a channel decision.

Your result
Read the method
What you are being scored against

Our own numbers, from our own category panel and a live results page

One of our top five cited domains is ours. Two are user-generated platforms no marketing team controls. We scored Blind the first time we ran this on ourselves.

MeasuredWhat it is
semrush 85 · youtube 83 · ahrefs 62 · indexableai 52 · reddit 52Most-cited domains in our category, by citing responsesOne of our top five is ours. Two are user-generated platforms no marketing team controls. · Indexable, 7 September 2026, 106 custom prompts, 5 engines, US
position 2 held by the platform owner, 1,566 referring domainsThe shape of the video results pageThe platform's own playlist held position 4, and the AI Overview cited three sources, one of them a video on that same platform. Where the top two slots belong to the platform owner, the asset is a citation target, not a ranking target. · Ahrefs, live SERP, September 2026
median 6.81 days, P90 37.10 daysHow long citations lag publicationThis is the reason a 45-day evaluation window beats a 30-day one: at 30 days you are reading the lag, not the result. Third-party measurement, not ours — and we hold it second-hand, so treat it as directional. · Profound, 2026, as reported in LinkedIn's 2026 AI Search Visibility guide
11 pagesOur own video pages, read as a cohort and noindexedWe changed 11 pages and recorded no before-and-after, so we have no outcome to report and make no traffic or ranking claim about it. · Indexable, August 2026
68.01%US searches that ended without a clickJanuary to April 2026. Third-party market context, not our estate. · SparkToro, 2026

One category, one results page, one panel. The citation-lag figures are Profound's, not ours, and we hold them second-hand — treat them as directional. A case study, not a law.

A channel decision is not a content brief

If the platform owner holds the results page, the question is not how to outrank them. It is which surface you intend to be quoted on, and who owns that budget line.

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