Reports suggest Reddit citations in ChatGPT have fallen sharply. Net Content SEO is starting a repeatable experiment using 20 identical queries to measure which sources ChatGPT actually cites today — and whether that changes over time.

For a while, Reddit looked like one of the obvious winners of AI Search. Its discussions appeared frequently in AI-generated answers, which led to a fairly predictable conclusion in the SEO world: if large language models like Reddit, perhaps Reddit should become part of every GEO strategy.

Then the numbers started moving.

Recent Promptwatch data reported by Axios suggests Reddit's average citation share in ChatGPT fell to 3.83% between July 18 and August 7. The exact reason for the decline isn't clear, and that uncertainty is actually the part we find most interesting.

If the sources favored by AI systems can change significantly within weeks, building a strategy around whichever domain happens to be heavily cited today may be a fragile approach.

So instead of speculating about why Reddit dropped, we want to measure something simpler ourselves: what does ChatGPT actually cite right now?

We are starting with 20 queries divided into four categories. Five will be informational questions, five will involve products or recommendations, five will ask about technology and AI, and five will focus on practical problems where forums and first-hand experiences would naturally be useful.

The wording of every query will be saved. We won't rewrite prompts because we dislike the results, and we won't select only examples where Reddit appears or disappears. For every answer, we'll record the sources and classify them into a small set of categories: Reddit, Wikipedia, publishers, company or official websites, forums and other sources.

The first dataset will give us a snapshot, not a universal answer to whether ChatGPT “prefers” Reddit. Twenty queries are nowhere near enough to establish that. Different questions can also produce very different retrieval patterns, and ChatGPT itself can change over time.

That's precisely why we're interested in repeating the experiment.

Thirty days later, we'll ask the same 20 questions again and compare the source mix. If Reddit appears in 15% of our citations today and 4% next month, that's interesting. If nothing changes, that's useful too. We can then repeat the test again and begin building a small longitudinal dataset rather than relying on isolated screenshots.

There is a broader question behind the experiment.

GEO is often discussed as though AI citation behavior were relatively stable: identify the sources models prefer, become visible on those sources and increase the probability of appearing in generated answers. But what happens if the preferred source ecosystem itself keeps changing?

Reddit may be important today, less important tomorrow and important again six months from now. The same could eventually happen to publishers, review sites, forums or any other source category.

If that is true, AI visibility may be less about finding the platforms that LLMs currently prefer and more about building information that remains useful when retrieval preferences change.

We don't know yet.

So we're going to measure it.

20 queries. Same wording. Same methodology. First test now, second test in 30 days.

We'll publish what happens, including the result if nothing interesting happens at all.

Test chatgpt: https://netcontentseo.net/article/we-tested-20-chatgpt-queries-reddit-appeared-but-far-less-than-we-expected-20-416

Test Gemini: https://netcontentseo.net/article/we-asked-gemini-the-same-20-questions-we-asked-chatgpt-the-sources-changed-20-417