AI search citations are not static. That may sound obvious, but it has an important consequence for anyone trying to understand AI visibility: a source that performs well today may not have the same role a few months from now.
Recent citation data from Peec AI suggests that the types of pages appearing in ChatGPT answers are changing. That matters because much of the current GEO conversation still treats citation patterns almost like traditional ranking factors — identify what works, reproduce it, and expect similar results.
AI search may be considerably less stable than that.
Peec has previously analyzed millions of citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, finding substantial differences in the sources preferred by each system. In one analysis of 30 million sources, Reddit was among the most-cited domains across all five platforms, while the rest of the source mix varied considerably by engine.
More importantly, those patterns can change over time.
A particularly interesting example comes from Peec's analysis of 64.77 million Reddit citations across 20 countries. ChatGPT's share of Reddit citations pointing to machine-translated pages fell from 6.14% in April 2026 to 0.66% in May and 0.30% in early June. Google AI products behaved very differently during the same period.
That is a useful reminder: there may be no permanent citation playbook for AI search.
At NetContentSEO, we recently tested this from a much smaller and deliberately different angle.
We asked ChatGPT 20 real-world questions and recorded which sources appeared. Reddit was still present, but considerably less often than we expected based on the broader narrative around ChatGPT's reliance on Reddit.
Our experiment is not large enough to establish a general trend. It was never intended to.
But combined with larger datasets showing that citation behavior changes over time, it raises a more interesting question:
Should we stop asking which sources AI prefers and start asking how those preferences are changing?
That distinction matters for GEO.
Traditional SEO taught us to think in relatively persistent signals. AI search introduces another variable: the retrieval and citation systems themselves can evolve quickly enough that yesterday's observed pattern may no longer describe tomorrow's answers.
This is also why we intend to repeat our own tests.
The same fixed questions, asked again later, may tell us more than continually inventing new ones.
Because in AI search, the change in the answer may eventually become more interesting than the answer itself.
Sources / further reading
Peec AI's analysis of translated Reddit citations:
Translated Reddit Is Winning AI Citations — Peec AI
Peec AI's 30-million-source analysis:
Top domains cited by AI search — Peec AI
Our experiment:
We Tested 20 ChatGPT Queries: Reddit Appeared, But Far Less Than We Expected
Our original question behind the experiment:
Does ChatGPT Still Prefer Reddit? We're Testing It Ourselves