Study of 1,200 AI Answers: Google Engines Drive 89% of Reddit Citations, Claude and ChatGPT Zero
drrickio · x · 2026-10-14
AppearsIn released a study covering 7 AI engines (8 models), 150 buying questions and 1,200 answers, with dataset and PDF report publicly available.
- Most cited sites: forbes.com (107 answers) and techradar.com (97); of 928 answers citing sources, 10.1% cited Reddit and 9.1% YouTube
- Reddit citations are heavily concentrated in Google's engines: Gemini 52.4% and Google AI Overview 44.3% — together 89% of all Reddit citations and 74% of YouTube citations; Grok 5.3%, Perplexity 1.3%, while ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet/Opus 5.5 and Meta Muse Spark showed 0%
- The authors verified the zeros are interface behavior, not capability: when explicitly asked, ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity and Grok did return Reddit links; Claude and Meta Muse Spark returned none
- The pattern is consistent with Reddit's data-licensing deals (with Google and OpenAI; it sued Anthropic in June 2025 and Perplexity in October 2025), though causation wasn't tested
- Citation mix varies by category: business software answers cite review sites like G2 at 22.6% vs 1.6% for everyday products, which lean on publications (51.9% vs 30.3%) and YouTube (14.3% vs 6.4%)
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