ChatGPT is citing Reddit far less: reddit.com's share of ChatGPT Search citations collapsed from about 4% to about 0.5% on August 14, 2026. Daily data for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode from July 7 to August 17.
That’s just for Google’s AI summaries, but it’s the only one with actual methodology disclosed I could find on a quick (non-AI) search.
Plenty of SEO mills with their own “studies” too, and the trend is similar. People don’t interact with the source sites or if they do it’s extremely seldom.
They (SEO mills) are currently trying to flip the gaslight towards “Worry not dear Webmaster, now you just have to make sure your content is now formed so it’s engaging for AI search and engage able right from the AI!” type shit.
I’m tired boss, and I’m not even generally (as in, in all aspects) anti-AI. Yet, I guess.
Ah yes, I’ve noticed lots of SEO consultant companies are trying to pivot into “we’ll help you to make AI scrape your website more so you show up in the AI search”.
I hadn’t seen the study before, thanks. That’s what I expected, honestly. I guess you could argue they are still building brand awareness, because people subconsciously note the brand as the source, but I don’t think that amounts to much.
I mean just about every metric I’ve seen suggests most websites that see an increase in scraping see a decrease in actual human visitors. I doubt there’s much distinction between chat and search users - the goal of these services is to drop click-through rates.
Oh, definitely. They are reinventing the old portals concept. That’s why I don’t think Reddit actually wants to encourage the scraping (partly also because they sell data themselves to build LLM, but that’s another thing)
Are there any statistics on how many LLM chatbot users actually click on the source links?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
That’s just for Google’s AI summaries, but it’s the only one with actual methodology disclosed I could find on a quick (non-AI) search.
Plenty of SEO mills with their own “studies” too, and the trend is similar. People don’t interact with the source sites or if they do it’s extremely seldom.
They (SEO mills) are currently trying to flip the gaslight towards “Worry not dear Webmaster, now you just have to make sure your content is now formed so it’s engaging for AI search and engage able right from the AI!” type shit.
I’m tired boss, and I’m not even generally (as in, in all aspects) anti-AI. Yet, I guess.
Ah yes, I’ve noticed lots of SEO consultant companies are trying to pivot into “we’ll help you to make AI scrape your website more so you show up in the AI search”.
I hadn’t seen the study before, thanks. That’s what I expected, honestly. I guess you could argue they are still building brand awareness, because people subconsciously note the brand as the source, but I don’t think that amounts to much.
I mean just about every metric I’ve seen suggests most websites that see an increase in scraping see a decrease in actual human visitors. I doubt there’s much distinction between chat and search users - the goal of these services is to drop click-through rates.
Oh, definitely. They are reinventing the old portals concept. That’s why I don’t think Reddit actually wants to encourage the scraping (partly also because they sell data themselves to build LLM, but that’s another thing)