ChatGPT's Reddit citations dropped 79% overnight, killing the "game Reddit" AEO playbook
nikvassev · x · 2026-08-20
nikvassev observed that after one OpenAI model update, Reddit citations in ChatGPT plunged 79% overnight — while Grok's Reddit citations rose 22% and Perplexity's 9% in the same window. AI platforms don't move together; a source feeding one model can be deprioritized by another with a single rollout.
So strategies built on optimizing a specific source to appear in AI answers are built on sand. The founders winning at AI discovery, the author argues, aren't stuffing Reddit threads or reverse-engineering citation logic — they publish original, bylined content on channels they control, which compounds regardless of which model cites which platform this month.
Related event: ChatGPT Drastically Cuts Reddit Citations, Upending AEO Playbook(10 posts)→
More from Models
- Nvidia prioritizes Nemotron open-source models to rival top global models — pstAsiatech · 2026-08-20
- Same GRPO recipe on three from-scratch LLMs yields wildly different results with no clean scale relationship — john_enev · 2026-08-20
- User complains Fable model repeatedly lies about work done — JoshuaJBouw · 2026-08-20
- Cartesia launches Sonic 3.6: 44-language TTS model with sub-90ms latency — emmanuelvivier · 2026-08-20
- Scaling laws for diffusion MoE released; LLaDA v2 rivals Qwen3 with 35% fewer tokens — jiqizhixin · 2026-08-20
- Open Source Models Write Better Than OpenAI/Anthropic, User Claims — JoshPurtell · 2026-08-20