Reddit was in Google’s top 10 for 90 percent of my software questions, 631 of 700, and in the top three for 515. ChatGPT’s live answers to the same 700 questions didn’t mention Reddit once: not as a link, not as a source, not as a word.
The 700 questions are the first seven High Salience teardowns, 100 buyer questions each in project management, CRM, email marketing, help desk, accounting, payment processing and payroll. ChatGPT answered each one once, logged out with web search on, between September 8 and 21, 2026, and I pulled Google’s results for the same questions alongside. Each “none” in this post belongs to the sample named next to it, and most of them to these 700 answers. The full write-up and the per-question file are on High Salience’s Reddit note.
Reddit in Google’s top ten, category by category
Reddit in Google’s top ten, category by category, never dropped below 83 percent of the questions.
| Category | Google top 10 | Google top 3 | AI Overviews shown | Overviews citing Reddit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project management | 99 | 95 | 100 | 28 |
| CRM | 91 | 77 | 94 | 21 |
| Email marketing | 93 | 70 | 90 | 9 |
| Help desk | 83 | 50 | 82 | 12 |
| Accounting | 92 | 80 | 95 | 18 |
| Payment processing | 85 | 70 | 95 | 10 |
| Payroll | 88 | 73 | 91 | 14 |
| All seven | 631 | 515 | 647 | 112 |
Project management was the extreme: Reddit was in the top three for 95 of its 100 questions. Help desk was the low point, and Reddit still made the top ten for 83.
Google’s AI Overviews cited Reddit in one of six
Google’s AI Overviews cited Reddit in about one of every six Overviews they showed: 112 of 647. So Google’s classic results leaned on Reddit hard, and its AI summaries used it some of the time.
YouTube did better inside the Overviews. It was the most-linked site there, with 524 of 2,395 source links, 22 percent, and it appeared in 221 of the 647 Overviews. reddit.com came next with 127 links. ChatGPT’s answers to the same questions cited YouTube in none of the 700 either, which High Salience’s YouTube note covers.
In these 700 answers, ChatGPT left Reddit out.
What ChatGPT’s live answers cited instead
What ChatGPT’s live answers cited instead was mostly the vendors themselves. Of 2,311 citation events in the 700 answers, counted once per cited domain per answer, 51 percent went to vendors’ own sites and 14 percent to review and media sites. The other 35 percent went to other third-party pages, such as comparison pages. Forums and communities, the group Reddit and Quora belong to, took none of them.
The pattern held when the series grew. Across all 21 software categories, none of the 6,443 ChatGPT citations pointed to reddit.com.
The same split outside software
The same split showed up outside software, in a smaller test. On September 26 I asked Google and ChatGPT the same 100 buyer questions, 25 each in fintech, healthcare, legal and ecommerce. Reddit ranked in Google’s top ten for 64 of them, and ChatGPT cited it in none of its 100 answers. In fintech, where Reddit dominated Google’s top ten, ChatGPT went to NerdWallet and the CFPB’s consumerfinance.gov instead. Twenty-five questions per industry is a snapshot, but it points the same way as the 700. The 64 is a corrected count: 28 of the 100 Google pages from September 26 came back swapped, full of the wrong sites, so for those I used Google’s page from October 23 (the first count was 68).
Why aggregated ChatGPT data shows Reddit
Why aggregated ChatGPT data shows Reddit is a question I had to answer before publishing, because my own earlier pull said the opposite. Earlier in September I pulled DataForSEO’s LLM Mentions data, an aggregated sample of ChatGPT answers collected over time across many prompts. In that corpus, Reddit was one of the ten most-cited domains in 14 of the 17 software categories with enough data, and in email marketing it was the single most-cited domain. Yet 100 live email marketing questions, asked once each, brought no Reddit mentions at all.
I don’t think either is wrong. The corpus pools many prompts that match a category keyword, collected over a longer window. My sample is 100 buyer-style questions per category, each run once, on one day per category. They measure different things, so I report them separately and say which one a number came from.
How I checked for Reddit
How I checked for Reddit was a plain text search of everything ChatGPT returned, plus a URL check on Google’s side.
- Questions
- 700, the query sets of the first seven teardowns (category, comparison, alternative and recommendation phrasing)
- ChatGPT
- Logged out, web search on, US English, one run per question, via the DataForSEO ChatGPT scraper; the full stored response, answer text and sources, searched for “reddit”
- First ten organic results per question, US English; an AI Overview counts as citing Reddit when a reddit.com link is in its sources
- Dates
- Project management September 8, five categories September 17, payroll between September 17 and 21, 2026
The same 700 questions feed the wider comparison in my summary of all 21 categories.
What the Reddit gap means for software brands
What the Reddit gap means for software brands, in my read, is that Reddit is a Google surface first. If your buyers’ questions bring up Reddit threads in Google, and for 9 of 10 of these questions they did, an accurate presence in those threads matters for search, and for some AI Overviews.
It wasn’t a lever for ChatGPT’s live answers in this sample, which read vendor pages, review sites and comparison pages instead. So I’d be wary of blanket “do Reddit for AI” advice, and I’d measure each AI surface separately, with the method attached to every number. A blended AI visibility score would have hidden this split. To run the same check on your own category’s questions, use the method I use for brand recommendations.
Sources
- Reddit Ranks for 90% of Software Questions in Google, Not in ChatGPT (High Salience)
- Google's AI Overviews Cite YouTube Most, and ChatGPT Never Did (High Salience)
- AI Answers in Four Industries: Where ChatGPT and Google Get Their Sources (High Salience)