Depending on whose data you look at, the decline was somewhere around 80%. Promptwatch measured Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations falling from an average of 3.83% between July 18 and August 7 to about 0.5% over August 14–17. Petra Labs independently observed a decline of about 80%.
When I saw the chart, my reaction was: I don’t care.
I don’t care because the week-by-week volatility of an LLM’s retrieval system doesn’t influence my marketing strategy — and it shouldn’t influence yours either.
By the way, if you want the audio version of this (and no, this isn’t a transcript), you can listen to that on the recent new episode of the Zero Click Marketing podcast. Oh! And if you’re new here, hello and welcome! Yes, I have a podcast. It’s often short-form monologues, so easy to binge or easy to check out one before deciding whether ya wanna commit.
If you’ve been investing in Reddit because your audience genuinely spends time there, then that means you’re reading the conversations in your category. You’re learning how people describe their problems. You’re answering questions when you have something useful to contribute. Maybe you’re watching people compare products, recommend vendors, complain about the incumbent solutions, or tell each other what they wish existed. That’s valuable marketing. It’s audience and customer research, rolled into one. You found value there, and increased AI visibility was the happy byproduct of your efforts.
Let’s talk a little bit more about how these underlying citation systems are incredibly unstable. Semrush recently ran the same 100 prompts through two different ChatGPT reasoning modes. Only 25.6% of the cited domains overlapped between the two. When ChatGPT used higher reasoning, it ran 4.6 times as many internal searches and cited nearly twice as many sources per answer.
So… we don’t even have one consistent thing called “ChatGPT citations.” Two modes of the same product can take the same basic question and go searching through very different parts of the web. Now add Gemini. Perplexity. Google AI Overviews. Claude. Copilot. Future models that haven’t been launched yet. Add product updates, ranking tweaks, retrieval changes, licensing agreements, and whatever happens next Tuesday.
Trying to organize your marketing strategy around whichever source is currently over-indexing in one of those systems is exhausting and a waste of time.
The wonderfully boring news
There was another piece of research I found much more interesting than the Reddit drop.
Profound recently analyzed 11.84 billion citations across eight AI systems. Across all models, roughly 57% of citations came from brand websites. Even ChatGPT, which relies on those brand sites the least in its answers, still accounted for 47% of all citations. 69% of all citations on Gemini are from brand sites.
Promptwatch found a similar pattern from a different angle. In its analysis of millions of classified ChatGPT citations during July, product pages were the biggest content type at 32.8%. Back in March, product pages had accounted for roughly 18%. So citations for product pages are up.
While marketers (or… our bosses?) have been furiously asking which external platform the AI systems love today, an enormous amount of the information these tools retrieve continues to come from… websites. And it’s awesomely boring. Make your website gooder. Explain your products well. Publish things worth knowing.
If you have original research, make it available. If you have expertise that nobody else in your industry has, put it somewhere people can find it. Make your documentation clear. Give journalists and creators reasons to reference you. Participate in communities where your customers already spend time.
Over time, you start building your various homes and apartments across the internet. Your website is the property you own. And then you rent your audience on LinkedIn, YouTube, or on a niche Subreddit. You don’t control those rented properties, and you don’t need to because together, they create a visible digital footprint. They give people multiple opportunities to discover you, understand what you know, and decide whether they trust you. And of course, they also give AI systems evidence to read and use.
Increased AI visibility is a benefit of good marketing
Today’s citation winner can become tomorrow’s 80% decline without your company changing a single thing. So if you like, sure, keep up with that news, but only as long as you’re focusing on the most durable, lasting question of all:
Where does my audience spend time, and am I doing something valuable enough there that they know who I am and trust me?
If the answer includes Reddit, keep doing Reddit.
If it includes your website, LinkedIn, YouTube, industry publications, newsletters, podcasts, communities, events, or some combination of all of them, build those things too.
Create enough useful, credible presence across the internet that when people go looking for information about your category, they — and the AI systems — can find you.
Then if ChatGPT changes its mind about Reddit again next quarter, you can look at the chart, learn something from it, and carry on because you’ll still have a marketing strategy.
🥮 Petits Fours
4 random/fun things that I think are worth your time because this newsletter is, after all, called, “the Menu.”
💙 One of my love languages is a solid, healthy, loving roasting by a dear friend. The friend in question is Jay Acunzo. I recently joined his show, “Why They Resonate,” where he gave me feedback on my MicroConf keynote talk. He helped me think through my context-setting (did we need THAT much of it? Maybe?), and I called myself a f-in idiot. That’s always fun.
🗣️ That MicroConf talk, by the way, now has over 60,000 views which is pretty crazy in my world! If you are one of the lovely people who watched that talk and became a subscriber, thank you very much for your support. I try to make this newsletter worth your while, and I don’t force it… meaning if I’m really strapped for time, this falls to the wayside because I don’t want to send you garbage.
😰 Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? My friend Sarah Stockdale sent me that essay and it’s quite good. (Yes, my little analog hobby is making sourdough bread.) Sarah, by the way, is hosting a personal brand summit with her company Growclass. Reply to/ping me if you need a discount. I may be able to get one.
👾 I really want to show off my Pokopia build: This is the cozy interior of my house in Withering Wasteland. How cute is this?! Ok, I’m sorry, this really wasn’t worth your time if you’re not playing Pokopia, but at least I didn’t make you click elsewhere to see it.
