AI tools never linked to Reddit when accessed by developers through their APIs, but Google AI Mode’s public website linked to Reddit in 44% of answers

Citation & visibility tracking

Platform	API: share of answers citing Reddit (%)	Web UI: share of answers citing Reddit (%)	Web UI: share of answers with any citation (%)
Google AI Mode	0%	44%	100%
Perplexity	0%	20%	100%
ChatGPT	0%	17%	58%
Claude	0%	0%	19%

Share of Answers Citing Reddit: API vs Web UI by Platform

Reader Note:: An API is the direct connection developers and AI-tracking tools use; the web interface is the site ordinary users open. Across 60 API answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, none linked to Reddit. In 100 questions per platform on the public websites, Reddit appeared in 44% of Google AI Mode answers, 20% of Perplexity’s and 17% of ChatGPT’s. Claude linked to Reddit in neither channel, but it linked to any source in only 19% of web answers. The two tests used different questions: the API test used 15 software-focused questions, while the web test used 100 questions across 13 topics. The web data came from one logged-in account per platform in February 2026. The source is a not peer-reviewed preprint from an AI consultancy.
Evidence:: Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:: Low
Sample:: Reddit corpus of 12,187 unique posts and 103,696 comments from 60 subreddits across 20 categories; AI side used 50 product recommendation queries across 4 platforms, each run 3 times, plus 15 API queries and 100 web UI queries for citation testing.