Reddit citations in ChatGPT Search drop sharply

Data from AI search visibility platform Promptwatch indicates that Reddit’s share of citations in ChatGPT Search has experienced a significant decline. Between July 18 and August 7, Reddit maintained an average citation share of 3.83%. However, following changes to ChatGPT’s search behavior, that share fell to an average of 0.52% between August 14 and August 17, representing an 86.4% relative drop.

Promptwatch founder Klaas Foppen noted that the decline coincided with changes to ChatGPT’s “query fanout” behavior. On August 8, the use of the “site:” operator—which restricts searches to specific domains—increased from 0.37% to 16.8% of all fanout queries. While this change in how ChatGPT performs background searches is a primary candidate for the shift, analysts note the timing is not perfectly aligned, as Reddit’s citation share did not fully collapse until six days after the initial query change. OpenAI has not provided a comment regarding these observations.