Where do Google's AI Overviews find their material when someone asks about a UK mortgage, and which of those sources can a brand do something about? We asked 499 mortgage questions in English in each of three weeks in September, with the location set to the United Kingdom, and analysed the 1,457 answers that came back. This article reports what moved since our August study of three AI engines, which kinds of site supply the answers, what AI Overviews take from Reddit, YouTube and Trustpilot, and how often they cite pages that rank brokers and lenders.
Key takeaways
The sites AI Overviews cite barely changed since August, and social networks moved most, from 6.4% to 9.6% of answers.
A brand's site is often used as a source without the brand being mentioned. Comparison sites are a source in 64.4% of answers and mentioned in 16.7%.
When a broker is mentioned without its own site, the answer leans on other publishers, often MoneySavingExpert.
About six cited sources in ten also rank in Google's top 10, as in August, and small firms are more often cited without ranking.
Each platform is cited for its own kind of content: Reddit most often for threads on choosing a broker, YouTube for videos that explain a process, Trustpilot for company review pages that come back week after week.
Pages that rank brokers and lenders appear in fewer than one answer in ten, and small sites built to host links barely appear.
1. Social networks and comparison sites were cited in more answers than in August
We group the sites that AI Overviews cite into families: lenders, brokers and insurers, comparison sites, public-sector sites, forums, social networks and so on. For each family we count the share of answers that cite at least one of its sites.
We only call a change real when it is bigger than the gap between the highest and the lowest of our three weekly readings in September.
By that test, two families moved. Social networks went from 6.4% of answers to 9.6%, with weekly readings of 9.3%, 9.7% and 9.8%. Facebook makes up most of the September figure: it is cited in 7.7% of September answers. We have no August figure for Facebook on AI Overviews alone. Comparison sites rose from 71.3% to 74.3%, a change of 3.0 points against a weekly gap of 2.4, so only just beyond our threshold.
The other families did not move by more than the weekly gap. Video came closest, from 12.9% of answers to 15.9% against a gap of 4.4 points. Lenders, brokers and insurers were cited in 92.5% of answers in September against 92.7% in August, public-sector sites in 28.9% and forums in 19.8%.
Counting citations rather than answers shows one more change of note. The share of all citations that go to lenders, brokers and insurers fell from 49.1% to 47.0%, a drop of 2.1 points against a weekly gap of 0.6. They still appear in almost every answer, but they make up a slightly smaller part of each answer's sources. Forums and comparison sites gained a fraction of a point of the citations each.
About six cited sources in ten also rank in Google's top 10, as in August
For anyone who works on both SEO and AI answers, the useful question is how closely AI Overviews follow the ten links below them. For each source cited, we checked whether its site was in the top 10 that Google returned for the same question.
Counted as in August, where a site counts as ranked if it is in the top 10 in any of the three readings, 62.3% of the sources cited are ranked, against 63.6% in August. Read week by week, against the top 10 of the same request only, the share is 60.0%, 57.4% and then 55.6%. It fell each week, but three readings are too few to call that a trend, and we will check it in October.
The link with company size that we reported in August holds. When AI Overviews cite a micro company, its site is outside the top 10 for that question in 62.2% of cases, against 59.1% in August. For a large firm the figure is 27.9%, against 25.5%. A top 10 position is common among the sources cited, and a micro company is cited without one more often than a large firm.
2. AI Overviews use comparison sites as sources far more often than they mention them
AI Overviews do two separate things. They write a text that mentions companies, and they list the pages they drew on. We call the first a mention. A brand's site is used as a source when it is among the pages listed under the answer.
For comparison sites the two counts are far apart. Over all questions, a comparison site is a source in 64.4% of answers and is mentioned in 16.7%. On questions about how a process works, the mention almost disappears. On the 35 process questions, such as "How does mortgage agreement in principle work in the UK?", comparison sites are a source in 54.8% of answers and are mentioned in 1.9%. This topic is small, with 35 questions asked in each of the three weeks.
Uswitch is the clearest case. Its site is used as a source in 309 answers, and 22 of those answers mention Uswitch.
Seen from the brand's side, about one use of its site in four comes with a mention
We also looked at it brand by brand. When an answer uses a brand's site as a source, does it also mention the brand? Across the 44 brands we track, it does in 26.9% of the cases. The rate is 19.9% for comparison sites, 31.6% for brokers and 34.1% for lenders.
These are associations, and they hold without the questions that contain a brand name
We have not tested whether using a site as a source changes what the answer writes. Some questions contain a brand name, which could push both counts up. We checked by leaving out the 41 questions that contain a brand name: the rate for all brands becomes 25.5%, and 19.7% for comparison sites.
3. For some brokers, MoneySavingExpert is among the sources when the broker's own site is not
If AI Overviews mention a broker but do not use the broker's site, which sources do they use instead? We took every answer that mentions a broker without citing its site, and listed the domains it does cite.
London & Country (L&C) gives 78 such answers. MoneySavingExpert is among the sources in 63 of them, or 80.8%. On the same questions, in the answers that do not mention L&C, MoneySavingExpert is a source in 44.8%. For Habito the figures are 88.1% and 33.3%. The comparison groups are small: 29 answers for L&C and 21 for Habito.
Seven brokers have enough of these answers to measure. The gap is clearest for three of them: L&C, Habito and Mortgage Advice Bureau, where the figures are 56.5% against 33.3%. For two others, MoneySavingExpert is a source in 84.6% and 94.7% of the answers to the same questions when the broker is not mentioned, so its presence cannot be tied to the mention. The last two show a smaller gap, one of them on only 12 comparison answers. Our reading is that, for some brokers, the answer draws on a page that already discusses them. We have not measured why.
Brands whose site is in Google's top 10 are mentioned far more often
When a brand's site is in the Google top 10 for the question, the answer mentions the brand in 20.2% of the cases. When it is not, the answer mentions it in 1.6%. Leaving out the 41 questions that contain a brand name gives 19.0% and 1.7%. This is an association: a question about a subject a brand covers well can explain both its ranking and its mention.
4. Reddit, YouTube and Trustpilot are cited on different kinds of question
Reddit is cited in 19.7% of answers, YouTube in 15.9%, Facebook in 7.7% and Trustpilot in 3.6%. Across all the community, video, review and social sites they cite, the answers point to 402 different pages. We sorted each page by topic from its title and the excerpt Google keeps. A language model did the sorting, and we checked a sample of 25 Reddit threads and 20 videos by hand. We did not read the threads or watch the videos, so a topic is only as good as a title and an excerpt.
The largest group of Reddit threads cited is about choosing a broker
Of the answers that cite Reddit, 46.0% include a thread about choosing a broker, and 13.2% a thread about how a process works. The most cited thread is "Is it worth while using a mortgage broker", on r/UKPersonalFinance. It is cited in 24 answers, in all three weeks. Another, "Where to find a good Mortgage broker / recommendations", is cited in 16.
Three subreddits appear most often. r/UKPersonalFinance is cited in 56.4% of the answers that cite Reddit, r/MortgageAdviceUK in 25.4% and r/HousingUK in 20.2%, and an answer can cite more than one. In 71.4% of the answers that cite Reddit, a cited thread opens with someone asking a question.
Reddit appears most on questions about choosing a broker. On the 110 questions of that topic, such as "What does a mortgage broker cost?", 40.6% of the answers cite Reddit.
The largest group of YouTube videos cited explains a process
Among the answers that cite YouTube, 26.4% include a video about a process and 17.3% one about types of loan. The most cited video is "How much income you need to afford the UK average house price". It is cited in 15 answers, in all three weeks.
The title and excerpt we captured rarely say who made the video. For 92.6% of the answers that cite YouTube, they do not identify the author. The channel name, which we did not capture, would often tell. A few cited videos are American, on questions about the UK: they appear in 10 answers.
YouTube appears most on general questions. On the 60 questions of that topic, such as "how much can i borrow mortgage", 36.9% of the answers cite it.
Trustpilot pages are company review pages, cited week after week
Trustpilot is the smallest of the four, at 3.6% of answers, and the most regular. 78.2% of its citations go to pages that appear in all three weeks, against 56.7% for Reddit and 37.1% for YouTube. Part of that steadiness comes from the small number of pages involved: 23 in all. 98.1% of the answers that cite Trustpilot include the review page of a company.
It appears on questions about reputation. On the 23 questions of that topic, such as "Are UK mortgage brokers actually worth using, based on what people say?", 35.8% of the answers cite Trustpilot.
Eleven of the cited Trustpilot pages belong to brands we track. Across them, the answer mentions the brand in 37 of 47 cases. The rate is high for ten of the brands, and one broker is mentioned in only 1 of the 8 answers that cite its page. We have not checked whether those questions already contain the firm's name.
Facebook is cited in 7.7% of answers, and we do not report its topics
Facebook is cited in 112 answers. Most of its cited pages, 47 of 56, come from accounts we cannot tie to a company, and we do not identify private accounts. The topic rules we used for those pages are less reliable than the sorting used for the other three platforms, so we leave their topics out.
5. Pages that rank brokers and lenders appear in fewer than one answer in ten
GEO advice often recommends getting a brand into "best of" articles. We checked how often AI Overviews cite a page that ranks providers, such as "Best Mortgage Brokers In The UK 2026".
We read the title and the excerpt Google keeps for every cited page whose title or address looked like a ranking or a list, and for a sample of 50 others. To test what titles miss, we then read the headings of 100 cited pages that we had classed as something else, and only 1 of the 81 we could open turned out to be a list of lenders. On that basis, 7.7% of answers cite at least one ranking page: 112 of 1,457, spread over 31 pages. The share reaches 14.9% on questions about choosing a broker, or 47 of 315 answers. Pages that list rates or deals, such as best-buy tables, are a separate format and appear in 22.3% of answers.
Forbes and lenders' or brokers' own sites publish most of the rankings cited
Among the answers that cite a ranking page, 42.0% cite one published on a lender's or broker's own site, 33.0% one from a media outlet and 12.5% one from a comparison site. The most cited ranking is Forbes's "Best Mortgage Brokers In The UK 2026", in 32 answers. The second, in 18 answers, is "Top 7 Best Mortgage Lenders for First Time Buyers UK in 2026", published by a small broker, ehfmortgages.co.uk.
Small sites that exist mainly to host links barely appear
We flagged the cited sites that fit none of our site categories and appear in Google's top 10 for fewer than three of our questions, which is the profile of a site built mainly to host links. Six of them publish a ranking page, and those pages are cited in 14 answers, about 1% of the total. The flag is only a clue, and a site can fit that profile for other reasons.
No brand's mentions rose with ranking pages by more than chance produces
We also checked whether a brand's mentions rose as it appeared more often alongside ranking pages. Twelve brands are mentioned often enough to follow week by week. Of these, only NatWest rose each week both in mentions, from 8.9% to 9.5% then 9.8% of answers, and in the share of its mentions that came with a ranking page, from 18.2% to 20.8%. In our simulations, chance alone flags a brand this way 2.6% of the time, so one rise of under a point among 12 brands is no evidence that ranking pages raise a brand's mentions. The other 32 brands are mentioned too rarely to test.
6. What this changes for a brand
Counting how often your pages are cited says little about how often your name appears. When an answer uses a brand's site as a source, it mentions the brand about one time in four, and less often for comparison sites.
When an answer mentions a broker without using its site, it draws on other people's pages. For three brokers, MoneySavingExpert is among them far more often than on the same questions when the broker is not mentioned. Those third-party pages are worth watching as closely as your own.
Of the platforms we measured, company review pages on Trustpilot are the ones AI Overviews cite most steadily from week to week. On Reddit, the largest group of threads cited comes from users asking which broker to choose.
A place in Google's top 10 is common among the sources cited, and the smallest firms are cited without one more often than large firms. Pages that rank providers appear in fewer than one answer in ten, and small sites that mainly host links barely appear at all.
Methodology
We put 499 questions in English to Google's AI Overviews, once a week on 6, 13 and 20 September 2026, with the location set to the United Kingdom. The 1,497 requests returned 1,457 answers that contained an AI Overview, covering 498 questions. We chose the questions among UK mortgage searches that already showed an AI Overview, and we left out searches whose only aim is to reach a brand's own site, so the study describes the searches where AI Overviews appear rather than every mortgage search. This article covers Google's AI Overviews only.
A brand is mentioned when its name appears in the text of the answer. Its site is used as a source, or cited, when its exact domain is among the pages listed under the answer; a subdomain does not count for the parent brand. A site is ranked when it is in the top 10 organic results that Google returned in the same request. To compare with August, the part on Google's top 10 in section 1 also counts a site as ranked for a question when it is in the top 10 in any of the three weeks, which is why that pooled figure is higher than any single week. The 44 brands we track are the lenders, brokers, comparison sites and other companies of our brand list, less four whose name or domain we cannot measure reliably. We count answers, so an answer that cites three pages of one site counts once. Each question is asked once a week, so the three readings of a question are not independent observations.
A change between August and September counts as a movement only if it is larger than the gap between the highest and the lowest of the three September weekly figures. In August we asked each question three times over three days, in a single round, so we can only measure the gap between weeks in September, and we use it for both months. The answers also vary within a single day: when we asked 100 questions a second time on 20 September, AI Overviews brought back only 69.0% of the brand mentions from the first reading, which is why we compare three weekly readings.
The topic of each platform page comes from its title and the excerpt Google keeps, sorted by a language model, and we checked a sample by hand. A video counts as American when its title or excerpt uses American terms or amounts. We have no August measure of these topics.
What this study does not cover
It covers one engine, one country setting and three weeks of one month. Google's top 10 is the only ranking we captured, so a page ranked eleventh looks unranked. We know the topic of a thread or a video only from its title and excerpt, and we recognise a ranking page the same way, with a check of the headings of 100 pages read on 30 September. We do not know why AI Overviews choose a source, and every link in this article is an association. Facebook topics are not reported.
Our August study of three AI engines also covers ChatGPT and Gemini, the searches they run before they answer, and how the size of a firm changes whether it needs to rank in Google to be cited.