| Research overview | The conclusions and the key data, shortened |
|---|---|
| Blog post with the full details | Reddit's Use Across AI Search. And What's Reddit's Future if ChatGPT+Web Search Moves to Bing? |
What the research found
Reddit has been part of AI search visibility from the start. Reports that ChatGPT was using Bing for some web searches raised a question about how that might change. I checked Reddit in Google, Bing and Brave results across the same 100 industries, then looked at five AI models with web search tools. Reddit’s presence varied significantly by search engine and by model. That gives us a basis for considering what a move to Bing could mean.
Findings you can quote
- Reddit is in the top 100 for 56.7% of queries in Google and in the top 10 for 0.2% of queries in Bing. In the Google top 10 it is 35.8%.
- Google News never returned Reddit: zero of 816,316 pooled results.
- Of 63,556 queries that triggered a Google AI Overview, 19.0% of the overviews cite reddit.com at least once. Reddit is 2.4% of all citations in them.
- Reddit is 24.3% of everything GPT-5.5’s search tool retrieves, more than any other host in the dataset. The model leaves Reddit out of its final answer in 97.9% of the runs where it retrieved it.
- Every Gemini 3.5 Flash run that retrieved a Reddit result also cited it.
- Reddit thread titles contain a question mark 38% to 65% of the time in text results, and about 10% of the time in video results.
Quotes from Ben Wills
These quotes are from the published research post.
“Google’s Forums search and Brave’s discussions section are both just Reddit with a different label.”
“97.9% of the time, GPT reads the Reddit thread and leaves it out.”
Story angles by audience
AI search visibility
You cannot assume that visibility on Reddit carries across AI engines. Claude Sonnet 5, Claude Haiku 4.5 and DeepSeek V4 Pro never retrieved Reddit in this test. GPT-5.5 retrieved it in nearly every run but rarely cited it. Gemini 3.5 Flash retrieved it less often and cited it every time it did.
SEO
The “forums” and “discussions” results are dominated by one site. Reddit appears in 99.9% of Google Forums queries and accounts for 99.5% of Brave’s discussions results. But the number of threads differs. Google shows one Reddit thread per query 97.1% of the time. When Brave’s discussions section includes Reddit, it shows five or more threads 48.1% of the time.
Reputation monitoring
Where you look changes how much Reddit you see. In Google’s top 100, 61.8% of Reddit appearances are below position 10. Reddit occupies two or more of those 100 slots in 48.4% of queries. And in two of the 5,500 AI runs, the model recommended reddit.com itself as a top 10 provider.
Content marketing
The question is often right there in the Reddit thread title. In text results, 38% to 65% of those titles contain a question mark. In video results, the title usually comes from the creator’s clip, and that number falls to about 10%.
What to keep in mind
- To compare Google and Bing on the same basis, use their top 10 results: 35.8% and 0.2%. The 56.7% figure covers Google’s top 100.
- Brave’s figures use the queries claude-sonnet-5 wrote itself. That is a different query set from the other sources, so the comparison is not like for like.
- I measured what the search tools retrieved and what the models cited. This does not tell us what Reddit does for a brand’s recommendations.
- The possible move of ChatGPT’s searches to Bing comes from reports mentioned in the post. I did not measure that change in this study.
- I collected the data in July 2026: 135,136 search result files containing 9,316,851 results, plus 5,500 AI search runs across five models.
Interviews
For an interview with Ben Wills, get in touch. You can find his background and the other research in the media kit.