After reports of a sharp decline in Reddit citations from ChatGPT, Net Content SEO ran 20 neutral queries across technology, products, travel, AI and everyday problems. Reddit has not disappeared, but our small test suggests it now emerges selectively rather than behaving like a default source across topics.

Yesterday we wrote about something unusual happening inside ChatGPT Search.

Data reported by Promptwatch suggested that Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations had fallen sharply. Axios reported an average citation share of 3.83% between July 18 and August 7, while subsequent data covering August 14–17 put the figure at around 0.52%. Nobody has established exactly why the change happened, and different tracking systems don't necessarily measure ChatGPT in exactly the same way.

Instead of trying to explain a system we cannot see from the inside, we decided to do something much simpler.

We asked ChatGPT 20 questions.

This was not designed to prove or disprove Promptwatch's numbers. Twenty queries obviously cannot represent the enormous number of searches performed through ChatGPT. The purpose was to create our own small baseline that we can reproduce later.

More importantly, none of the prompts mentioned Reddit.

We deliberately mixed different types of questions: product recommendations, technology problems, travel, AI, software, consumer experiences, SEO and practical everyday questions. We wanted ChatGPT to choose its own sources rather than push it toward a particular community.

And Reddit didn't disappear.

But it certainly didn't dominate either.

Across many of the answers, ChatGPT relied on sources such as official documentation, manufacturers, specialist publishers, testing sites and other authoritative or topic-specific sources. Queries about Linux referenced Steam data. Privacy search questions surfaced the search engines themselves. MacBook battery advice leaned heavily on Apple. Tesla questions used Tesla alongside automotive sources. AI coding questions pulled from developer surveys, technical research and platforms connected to software development.

Then something interesting happened when the questions became more experiential.

When we asked what travelers were saying about visiting Japan during summer, Reddit appeared several times alongside Reuters and Japan Travel.

When we asked about people's real-world experience using Starlink as their primary internet connection, Reddit became much more prominent.

And when we asked what website owners are experiencing with Google's “Crawled – currently not indexed” problem in 2026, Reddit appeared again alongside Google documentation and SEO sources.

That distinction may be more interesting than simply asking whether Reddit citations are “up” or “down”.

ChatGPT still appears willing to use Reddit when the question benefits from first-hand experience. It simply didn't appear consistently across our broader set of queries.

There were plenty of questions where Reddit could plausibly have been useful but wasn't surfaced at all.

Questions about mechanical keyboards, smart-home frustrations, Android-to-iPhone switching, Linux adoption and consumer technology are all subjects with enormous Reddit communities. Yet our responses frequently relied on manufacturers, specialist publications, surveys or other sources instead.

That doesn't demonstrate that Reddit has been algorithmically demoted. We cannot infer that from 20 prompts, and we don't know the internal retrieval or source-selection mechanisms behind these individual answers.

But it gives us something much more useful for our purposes: a baseline.

On August 21, 2026, we asked these 20 questions in separate ChatGPT conversations and saved the first response. We didn't ask ChatGPT to search Reddit, didn't include Reddit in the prompts and didn't regenerate answers until we obtained a particular source.

Now we leave the experiment alone.

In 30 days, we'll ask the same 20 questions again, using the same wording and the same procedure.

That's when this becomes more interesting.

If Reddit appears in roughly the same kinds of answers, we have evidence of relative stability within our small sample. If it suddenly appears everywhere again, or disappears almost completely, we have measured a change using queries that were fixed before seeing the second set of results.

And this is ultimately the larger Net Content SEO question behind the experiment.

A lot of GEO advice is based on observing what AI systems cite today and then trying to reproduce it. Reddit is valuable? Publish on Reddit. Forums are being cited? Get into forums. YouTube becomes prominent? Produce videos.

But what if source preference itself is volatile?

The lesson from the current Reddit story may eventually have very little to do with Reddit.

If an AI system can materially change which types of sources it retrieves over a matter of weeks, optimizing for today's preferred source could be the AI-search equivalent of optimizing for yesterday's ranking factor.

Our first 20-query test doesn't answer that question.

The second test might start to.

We will repeat the exact same experiment in September.

This is the first baseline of the Net Content SEO ChatGPT Citation Test. Read why we started the experiment and the background behind Reddit's reported citation decline.

Does ChatGPT Still Prefer Reddit? We're Testing It Ourselves