Reddit Ranks for 90% of Software Questions in Google, Not in ChatGPT

The same 700 questions produced opposite answers on how often Reddit appears in Google and in ChatGPT: Google leaned on Reddit, and ChatGPT never mentioned it.

Google's own AI Overviews sit between the two. They appeared on 647 of the 700 questions and cited Reddit in 112 of them, 17%. So Google's classic results lean on Reddit heavily, its AI summaries use it sometimes, and ChatGPT's web search did not use it at all in this sample.

Some other ChatGPT data does show Reddit citations, but this result is about live answers: questions typed into ChatGPT with web search on, the way a buyer would ask them. It is not the only way to look at ChatGPT's sources, and a different method gives a different picture.

Earlier in September we pulled DataForSEO's LLM Mentions data, an aggregated sample of ChatGPT answers collected over time across many prompts. In that corpus, Reddit was one of the ten most-cited domains in 14 of the 17 software categories with enough data, and in five of the seven categories studied here it took between 7 and 18 percent of the top-ten citations. In email marketing it was the single most-cited domain. Yet on 100 live email marketing questions, ChatGPT mentioned Reddit zero times.

We do not think either method is wrong. The corpus aggregates many different prompts matching a category keyword, collected over a longer window; our live sample is 100 buyer-style questions per category, run once each on a single day. The practical lesson is the same one this note is about: measure each AI surface, and each way of sampling it, separately, and attach the method to any number you quote.

We collected the Reddit data from Google and ChatGPT side by side.

Questions: the 700 queries from our seven published teardowns, 100 per category, split across category, comparison, alternative and recommendation phrasing. The full list is in the dataset.

ChatGPT: web search on, logged out, United States, English, one run per question, collected via the DataForSEO ChatGPT scraper. We searched the full stored response, answer text and sources, for the string "reddit".

Google: the first ten organic results for each question, United States, English, collected alongside the ChatGPT answers (project management on September 8, 2026; five categories on September 17; payroll between September 17 and 21, so its two surfaces were up to four days apart). A question counts if any reddit.com URL appeared in those ten. AI Overviews count as citing Reddit if a reddit.com link appeared in the Overview's sources.

Limits: one run per question, one country, commercial software questions only. Answers vary between runs, so treat these as frequencies for this sample, not permanent rules. Absence here means not observed in 700 answers, not that ChatGPT can never cite Reddit. OpenAI does have a content partnership with Reddit, announced in May 2024; this data says nothing about how that content is used outside visible web-search citations.

For your search strategy, the Reddit finding means planning for Google and ChatGPT separately.

• Reddit is a Google surface first. If your buyers' questions surface Reddit threads in Google, and in 9 of 10 of these questions they did, an accurate presence in those threads matters for search.
• Reddit is not a universal AI lever. For live commercial software questions, ChatGPT built its answers from vendor sites, review sites and comparison pages: none of its 2,311 citations in the first 7 categories (700 answers, September 2026) pointed to reddit.com. Across all 21 categories, no reddit.com URL appeared among the 6,443 ChatGPT citations. Our AI citations analysis shows exactly where they went.
• Measure each AI surface separately. Google AI Overviews did cite Reddit in about one in six cases. What works in one answer engine can be invisible in another.
• Be wary of blanket "do Reddit for AI SEO" advice. Reddit shows up in some ChatGPT data and not in other data. It was absent from ChatGPT's live answers to these 700 buyer questions.

More practical guidance is in our guide to Reddit SEO and AI visibility.

You can check the figures in the per-question Reddit dataset, which has one row for each of the 700 questions: the query, whether Reddit ranked in Google's top ten and at what best position, whether an AI Overview appeared and cited Reddit, and whether the ChatGPT answer mentioned Reddit.

• reddit-presence.csv (700 rows, CC BY 4.0)

Companion note: YouTube in Google's AI Overviews vs ChatGPT, from the same 700 questions.

The underlying ChatGPT citation datasets are published on each teardown page.

Every category draws on a different mix of sources, so it is worth finding out how much Reddit matters for search in yours, and which other sources do. The Category Salience Brief maps them across Google and the AI surfaces, with competitors side by side, and it is the first step in our AI search optimization program.