Reddit Citations Are Dropping in ChatGPT

Summary:

This report focuses on how often Reddit shows up as a cited source in AI answers, especially in ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.

It was published by Promptwatch, a company that sells AI visibility tracking.

The goal here is to show day-by-day changes in citation share and flag a possible change in how these AI systems pick sources.

Promptwatch says it collects data from the real user interfaces of major AI platforms. It says the dataset includes millions of prompt responses and more than 26 billion data points covering prompts, citations, responses, and click data.

The main finding is that Reddit's citation share in ChatGPT dropped off a cliff.

Promptwatch says Reddit held a roughly 3.83% average share from July 18 through August 7, then fell below 1% on August 14, with an August 14 to 17 average of 0.52%, an 86.4% relative drop. It also says the decline may have started on August 8, when ChatGPT changed query fanout behavior, with Reddit falling from the high 3% range into the mid 2% range.

In Google AI Overviews, Reddit's share drifted down more gently, from about 2.37% in the first seven days to 2.10% in the final seven, an 11.3% relative decline.

In Google AI Mode, the decline was bigger than in AI Overviews but still gradual: from 2.22% in the first seven days to 1.54% in the final seven, a 30.5% relative drop. The report also points to a clearer step down in AI Mode at the end of July.

Note that his is vendor-published monitoring data from a company selling exactly this kind of tracking. The methodology is only partly disclosed, so key details about prompt selection, weighting, representativeness, and quality checks are missing.