No, ChatGPT has not stopped citing Reddit

As the old rules of search engine optimization have been all but obliterated by AI-powered search engines , marketers and advertisers have been seeking new ways to get their clients and brands in front of eyeballs on the internet. To the dismay of Redditors, that's meant an influx of brands trying to add mentions to organic conversations on Reddit message boards, since the site has had a significant presence in AI chatbots' answers to search queries.

According to AI search firm Promptwatch , however, there was a sharp drop in Reddit citations in ChatGPT results during a recent four-day period. Reddit made up nearly 4% of ChatGPT citations between July 18 and Aug. 7, Promptwatch's research found. But beginning Aug. 14, Reddit's share of ChatGPT results had dropped to less than 1%. It dropped again to 0.52% between Aug. 14 and Aug. 17, representing an 86% decline overall, and prompting speculation that OpenAI had removed Reddit as an information source. 

But according to OpenAI, the company does not target or set a fixed level of visibility for individual websites, and Reddit continues to be cited by ChatGPT. The company regularly updates and improves the AI chatbot, which can affect the sources that appear in search results and how often they appear, causing patterns to fluctuate over time. 

Search Engine Journal reported this week that ChatGPT had made changes to how it handles search queries on Aug. 8. That article further notes that a similar drop in Reddit's share of ChatGPT results happened in September, which one analyst suggested had more to do with changes Google had made to search parameters, rather than any adjustments by OpenAI or Reddit.

For marketers who use Reddit as a tool to boost brands' visibility, this latest report probably doesn't mean you should go back to the drawing board, but it also doesn't mean that you'll get any less frosty of a reception from Redditors who probably aren't going to engage with you anyway.