Traffic from ChatGPT to Reddit has recently been cut in half. If you don't know, Reddit has been the most cited source by ChatGPT for quite a while but it looks like ChatGPT put out an update in mid September and now it cites them much less often. I'd like to talk about what we've been seeing, what the top sided website by ChatGPT is now and how this might affect you if you're trying to be recommended by ChatGPT.
We track the citations of large language models like ChatGPT for about 30 of our clients. One thing you'll notice when you do this is that the citations vary wildly between industries. For most of our clients, Reddit isn't the number one source, but it's almost always in the top 10 and for a few clients it really is 50% or more of the citations heard.
Across all industries, Reddit makes up about 14% of citations historically. Yesterday I went through all 30 clients and for almost all of them Reddit dropped by about half in mid September. So that begs the question, who's the number one cited website now?
Reddit. It's still Reddit. I couldn't find one single site that shot up in rankings.
It looks like Reddit just dropped. Maybe OpenAI or the model itself realized that Reddit isn't such a reliable source, but it's still being used a lot. So if Reddit is still the most Important place for your brand to be mentioned.
Why even bring this up? Well, I think it's important to notice how volatile these models still are. The factors that determine who gets recommended by these large language models change significantly every month.
However, the core strategy stays the same. Make sure your brand is mentioned in the sources these large language models are citing before they make a recommendation. And because very few brands are doing this right now, there's a ton of opportunity.