Ask ChatGPT “who’s good at X around here?” and it’ll hand you three or four company names without blinking. Useful. But it should bug you a little.
Where is it getting them?
I assumed the obvious thing: your site, some trade press, maybe a roundup piece somebody wrote. Well-behaved sources. The kind of places a marketer knows how to work on.
But when you look at what the models actually cite, at scale, the answer is somewhere else entirely. And it’s a place no marketing team has a login for.
”So What Is The AI Reading, Exactly?”
The piece that caught me is an analysis of over 150,000 AI citations from ziptie.
They took the sources ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews reached for inside their answers and just counted them up. Which came out on top?
Reddit. 40.1% of everything cited. Not a close first.
Reddit, if you’ve somehow avoided it, is a giant forum where strangers argue about their hobbies and their problems under fake names. No press office, no brand guidelines, no one checking the copy.
And this isn’t one study’s quirk. A separate look at 30 million sources put Reddit at #1 across the major AI engines too. Two different counts, same answer.
The Citations Pile Up On A Handful Of Places
Here’s the other thing, and I think it’s the more important one. AI citations aren’t spread thin across the web. They cluster hard — one roundup pooling roughly 680 million citations found the top 15 domains alone took about 68% of them.
So the model isn’t grazing across a million sites. It goes back, over and over, to the short list of places it treats as trustworthy — and Reddit sits at the front of that queue.
The clustering gets worse in the places where money changes hands. One report has Reddit citations on commercial queries (the “which one should I buy” kind) up more than 70% quarter over quarter.
Read that again, because it’s the whole point. At the exact moment somebody’s deciding whether to buy, the AI goes looking for what real users said.
Though the dose varies a lot by model. Reddit is close to half of what Perplexity cites; on ChatGPT it’s more like a tenth. So which model your buyers use changes which room you should care about.
Why Strangers Beat Your Own Copy
Why would a model lean this hard on a forum?
Think about what it’s got to work with. Your site says you’re great. Obviously it does — that’s what your site is for. So the model marks it down, the way an interviewer marks down a candidate who says they’re a real people person.
But a stranger with nothing to gain, writing “we used these guys last year and it went fine,” is testimony. Nobody paid for it. That’s a source you can quote without getting embarrassed.
And the volume of that testimony shows up in the numbers. One domain analysis found brands with a lot of Reddit mentions averaged 7 AI citations; brands with few averaged 1.8.
Call it 3.9x.
”Great, So We’ll Just Get More Posts Up”
No. Sit with the caveats first.
This is correlation, not cause. Maybe the talk drives the citations, or maybe being a known brand produces both, and nobody has cleanly pulled those apart. The size of the effect swings by industry too.
And astroturfing — paying or pretending your way into fake enthusiasm — is off the table. Not because it’s tacky. Because it burns your credibility when it surfaces, and it does surface; the models are also getting better at spotting reputation that looks too tidy to be real.
Maybe I’m putting more weight on the convergence than it can hold. But two independent counts landing on the same domain still beats either one alone.
Conclusion: You Can’t Write The Reviews, But You Can Earn Them
Here’s the part still bugging me a week after I read it.
Getting named by a model is settled in rooms you’ll never own. Not your site, not the outlet you pitched, not the deck you spent a month on — a thread where somebody asks which vendor won’t waste their time, and a stranger answers. And you can’t wade in as yourself without the whole thing curdling. That’s the problem in one line.
Which leaves one honest lever: be worth mentioning, then get out of the way. Ship the thing a customer wants to tell somebody about, and make it easy for them to do it — ask for the review, show up where your users already are, answer the awkward question in public under your own name. Slow, unglamorous, and the only version that survives contact with a model learning to smell a fake.
Then count, which I’d bet is the bit most teams skip. Say the talk about you doubles this quarter. A rank report will tell you exactly nothing about whether a single model noticed. So watch how often ChatGPT and Perplexity actually name you, and watch them separately, since the dose isn’t remotely the same between the two.
I’d filed word of mouth under “nice when it happens” for years. Turns out it’s an asset with a balance you can read. The strange part is how few people are reading it.
Sources
- ziptie, “Why Reddit Dominates ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews”, 2026, ziptie.dev (over 150,000 AI citations analyzed; Reddit ranked #1 at 40.1% of all citations)
- Contently, “Top Sources LLMs Cite Most in 2026”, April 2026, contently.com (Peec AI’s 30-million-source analysis put Reddit #1 across the major AI engines; SE Ranking found brands with many Reddit mentions averaged 7 AI citations vs 1.8 for brands with few)
- 5W, “AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026”, 2026 (roughly 680 million citations pooled; the top 15 domains account for about 68% of AI citations), semrush.com
