Mentioned Research · August 19, 2026 · July study follow-up
In our July study, ChatGPT cited Reddit in 6.0% of 1,273 buyer queries. We re-ran the exact same queries on August 19 through three paths at once. The real ChatGPT interface now cites Reddit in 0.4% of answers — a 15× collapse. The same queries through OpenAI’s search API still cite Reddit at the July rate, and Google still ranks the same threads. Whatever changed in mid-August lives in ChatGPT’s citation layer, not in the model or the index.
of ChatGPT answers cited Reddit, same 1,273 queries, ~3 weeks apart
informational queries got a Reddit citation from ChatGPT on August 19
the same queries through OpenAI’s search API — unchanged from 6.0%
of the same searches still show Reddit in Google’s top 30 (69.3% before)
Each bar pair is the same 1,273-query panel measured in the July study and again on August 19. For the two ChatGPT rows the value is the share of answers containing at least one reddit.com citation; for Google it is the share of searches with a Reddit result in the top 30. If the model or Reddit’s standing in search had changed, all three would move. One moved.
Collected from the real ChatGPT Search interface. 5 of 1,273 answers cited Reddit — and one of those five queries literally contains the word “Reddit”.
gpt-5-search-api, the same measurement the July study used: 5.3% vs 6.0%. Anyone monitoring “AI visibility” through the API cannot see this change at all.
Fresh depth-30 SERP pull for all 1,300 keywords: Reddit on 66.2% of pages, top 3 on 48.4% — within two points of July. The threads didn’t lose standing.
The collapse is not uniform noise — it is near-total everywhere. Of 637 informational queries, not a single answer cited Reddit. The five survivors are edge cases: a query naming Reddit, hyper-local recommendations, and product-review lookups.
Independently of the query panel, Mentioned collects every AI answer for the prompts our customers track — 453 ChatGPT runs across 368 real buyer prompts between August 13 and 19. Reddit took 7 of the 2,089 citations ChatGPT emitted that week (0.34%), with zero on five of the seven days. The telling detail from the raw payloads: ChatGPT still retrieved Reddit threads 35 times while answering. It reads Reddit and then cites something else.
| Day | ChatGPT runs | Citations | Reddit share | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 13 | 20 | 27 | 0 | 0.00% |
| Aug 14 | 84 | 381 | 0 | 0.00% |
| Aug 15 | 274 | 1,392 | 6 | 0.43% |
| Aug 16 | 10 | 43 | 1 | 2.33% |
| Aug 17 | 19 | 74 | 0 | 0.00% |
| Aug 18 | 25 | 93 | 0 | 0.00% |
| Aug 19 | 21 | 79 | 0 | 0.00% |
The same prompts, the same days, other engines: Perplexity cited Reddit in 7.4% of its citations, Google AI Mode 3.7%, Gemini 2.2%. ChatGPT sits 10–20× below every other engine on identical prompts.
The query panel is the same 1,273 unique US-English buyer queries (26 industries, commercial / informational / transactional intents) used in the July 2026 study. The July ChatGPT baseline was collected July 31 – August 1 via gpt-5-search-api with web search. On August 19 we measured three paths: the ChatGPT Search interface (via DataForSEO’s llm_scraper, US location — the same transport our product uses for daily monitoring), gpt-5-search-api again (identical to July), and Google organic results at depth 30 (DataForSEO, US). “Cited Reddit” means a reddit.com URL appeared in the answer’s structured source list; retrieval without citation is counted separately.
Limits: the panel is one location, one language, one day per wave. The product-run series (Aug 13–19) covers six customer workspaces with B2B-skewed prompts and begins the day our collection went live, so it cannot show its own before/after — the panel rerun carries that comparison. External daily trackers date the product-side break to August 14; our data is consistent with that date but does not pin it independently. Consumer-surface scraping reflects what a logged-out US user sees and can differ under personalization. Correlation across surfaces isolates where the change happened; it does not reveal why OpenAI changed source selection.
The channel that collapsed was never the reliable one — our July study already found no relationship between Google rank and ChatGPT citations. The channels that still pay are unchanged: half of buyer searches put a Reddit thread in Google’s top 3, and Google’s AI surfaces and Perplexity keep citing those threads. Mentioned measures presence per engine, so a shift like this shows up in your scoreboard instead of your assumptions.
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