Reddit citations in ChatGPT answers fell 88 percent, Ahrefs study finds

The brands that owned the Reddit thread used to show up in the answer, and now they do not. Between March and September this year, Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations fell by 88 percent, from one in five answers to one in forty-three, according to a new Ahrefs study of 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT responses and the 15 million fan-out queries behind them.

Writing for Ahrefs, Louise Linehan reports similar falls for Wikipedia and YouTube over the same period. Wikipedia citations dropped 80 percent, from one in seven answers to one in thirty-five. YouTube declined 27 percent, from one in 370 to one in 500. The study covers answers from August and September 2026, with the citation trends read from an earlier Ahrefs dataset that began in March.

Where the queries are going instead

When ChatGPT does search the web, it looks at brand sites. Only 14.4 percent of the 66.6 million answers triggered a web search at all, and when they did, ChatGPT ran an average of 1.6 fan-out queries each time. About 6.8 percent of those fan-outs used the site: operator, targeting around 116,000 domains in total. Of the most-searched domains, Linehan reports that 75.9 percent were brand websites. Retailers took 11.9 percent. Social sites and forums together took 1.9 percent.

The top five sites ChatGPT ran site: queries against were apple.com (9,442 queries), ikea.com (7,361), nike.com (5,210), adidas.com (4,619) and samsung.com (4,432). Government domains such as gov.br and gov.uk also appear in the top ten.

What ChatGPT asks about more often

The language of the fan-out queries moved too. The word "official" appeared in 10.1 percent of English fan-outs in August and 13.1 percent in September. "Price" rose from 6.0 percent of queries to 8.9 percent, which Ahrefs reports as roughly a 47 percent relative increase in one month. Queries containing "reviews" grew by around a third over the same window.

Factual questions, such as pricing or company detail queries, cited at least one official source 84.4 percent of the time. Comparison questions, such as "A vs B", cited an official source 68.3 percent of the time. For factual queries where an official source was present, 63.4 percent of the citations in the answer went to that official site rather than to a review or roundup page.

What Ahrefs recommends

Linehan's practical read is that aggregator and summary pages are no longer a reliable path into ChatGPT answers, because the model is going to the source. Ahrefs recommends putting product facts, pricing and specifications in plain text on crawlable pages, prioritising original research and first-hand testing content, and tracking which fan-out queries name your brand each month. The piece also notes a rise and fall in OpenAI partner-publisher citations: from 7.5 percent in March to 15.8 percent in July, then 12.5 percent in September.

Linehan's figures and recommendations are Ahrefs' own, drawn from its Brand Radar product, and the study only covers free, logged-out sessions. The company says these are the closest proxy to how most people use ChatGPT, because more than 90 percent of weekly users are on the free plan.

For a team that has spent the last year working to be named in Reddit threads or Wikipedia entries as a way to earn AI citations, those routes are now one twentieth of what they were six months ago. The content on a brand's own site, written to answer the specific "price", "official" and "reviews" questions ChatGPT is now asking, is what the model reads instead.

Source

How ChatGPT Does Query Fan-Out (15 Million Queries Studied), Louise Linehan, Ahrefs.