Foundation and AirOps study says Reddit is in 52 percent of AI Mode answers

A B2B marketing team may have done the SEO work on its own site. It can still be absent from the AI answers its buyers now ask. Ross Simmonds, the chief executive of Foundation Marketing, wrote on Search Engine Journal about why. His post reports a joint study with AirOps that tracked about 380,000 AI answers across 81 enterprise software topics. The post calls the finding a new organic growth stack with five layers, and gives a citation share for each.

What the study measured

Foundation and AirOps ran the same questions through Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI answer surfaces. They then looked at which sources those answers cited. The post reports the shares as Foundation's own. Reddit was cited in 52 percent of Google AI Mode answers and in 21 percent of ChatGPT answers. YouTube was cited in 47 percent of Google AI Mode answers and in 0.3 percent of Gemini answers. The study found that 84 of the 100 most cited B2B software URLs were comparison pages or listicles. Of those, 59 were comparison pages and 25 were listicles.

What the study means for a team that only writes its own blog

A team that writes only on its own domain is missing from four of the five layers. The four are: communities such as Reddit. Social platforms such as LinkedIn and YouTube. Video content. Review sites such as G2 and Capterra. Simmonds cites a separate figure from the same study: review sites shape 38 percent of B2B software shortlists. He states the figure as a study result from his own firm.

What the article says about the open web

The post quotes other research. It cites a Pew Research figure from January to April 2026. That figure says 68 percent of United States Google searches ended without a click. The post also cites a survey figure: 51 percent of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot. That is up from 29 percent the year before. The click figure and the chatbot figure are not from the Foundation and AirOps study. Simmonds names each source in the post.

The limit of these numbers

The 52 percent and 47 percent are the study's own figures. Foundation and AirOps measured them on 81 enterprise software topics. The post does not describe the full question set. It does not publish the raw list of cited URLs. An outside reader cannot check the method. A team that cares about its own category has to run the same test with its own question list.

What this changes for a team selling B2B software: a marketing plan that only publishes on the company's own site is now measurable against this baseline. The team can rank its topic in Google, in AI Mode, in ChatGPT and in Gemini. It can then compare which sources each tool quotes. The share of the answer that comes from Reddit, YouTube and review sites is a number the team can use. It tells the team where next month's effort should go.

Source

• The New Organic Growth Stack: Search, Social, Communities and AI, Search Engine Journal, by Ross Simmonds, Foundation Marketing