Reddit has influenced AI Search Visibility since day 1. ChatGPT now uses Bing for some web searches. Will Reddit influence AI Search as much with Bing? Let’s see…
I checked how much Reddit actually shows up in search results and in AI models’ web searches. Google, Bing, Brave, and five different AI models, all researching the same 100 industries. Every SERP, every AI search tool call, checked for reddit.com.
This is one part of a bigger project I’m running. The AI Search Visibility and Ranking Factors Report goes live Monday, July 20th.
Methodology
Four data sources, one 100-industry research corpus:
- Six SERP sources, same keyword corpus:
- Bing: 15,546 files
- Google, top 100 (also covers the top-10 view): 74,174 files
- Google Forums: 10,772 files
- Google News, top 100: 10,772 files
- Google Videos, top 100: 10,772 files
- Google Short Videos: 10,772 files
- Brave Search API: 2,328 queries. The free-text fanout queries claude-sonnet-5’s search tool generated on its own.
- 5,500 LLM search-fanout runs, 1,100 each: claude-sonnet-5, claude-haiku-4-5, gemini-3-5-flash, gpt-5-5, deepseek-v4-pro. Every search query issued, every URL retrieved, every URL actually cited. All extracted and checked.
- Reddit = reddit.com, *.reddit.com, redd.it, *.redd.it.
One thing to know: Gemini’s retrieved-source titles come back pre-cleaned by its own grounding API. That is why the question-mark check reads 0% for Gemini specifically. It is a formatting quirk, not a Reddit signal.
Reddit Across the Search Engines
“Presence” means the share of queries where Reddit shows up at all. “Share of results” means Reddit’s share of every pooled result in the whole corpus. Six of these sources use the same keyword list. Brave’s row uses a different set of queries, claude-sonnet-5’s own fanout queries, noted above. It is still real data from a real search engine, just not the same queries as the rest of the table.
| Source | Presence (≥1 Reddit result) |
Share of pooled results |
Avg best rank, when present |
Top 1 | Top 3 | Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing (top 10) | 0.2% | 0.0% | 5.8 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.2% |
| Google (top 100) | 56.7% | 1.2% | 13.9 | 4.7% | 15.9% | 35.8% |
| Google Forums (top 10) | 99.9% | 10.5% | 1.4 | 77.7% | 96.9% | 99.9% |
| Google News (top 100) | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Google Videos (top 100) | 21.1% | 0.4% | 51.6 | 0.1% | 0.5% | 1.9% |
| Google Short Videos (top 10) | 5.9% | 0.5% | 8.4 | 0.1% | 0.4% | 4.4% |
| Brave “web” (top 20) (Sonnet 5 fanout) | 27.6% | 2.3% | 10.1 | 1.8% | 4.7% | 14.3% |
For the identical keyword set, Reddit shows up in 56.7% of Google’s top-100 results and 0.2% of Bing’s. Google News never surfaces it at all: zero, out of 816,316 pooled results.
My data: Bing (15,546 files) vs Google top-100 (74,174 files) vs Google News top-100 (10,772 files), same keyword corpus.
Reddit shows up in Google Videos (21.1% of queries) and even Google Short Videos (5.9%), but it is buried when it does. The average best rank in Google Videos’ top 100 is 51.6. 95.3% of every Reddit appearance there ranks below position 10. Page one of a video search is not where you find Reddit. Page five or six is.
There is a second problem in Google’s top 100. Of every Reddit result in those 100 slots, 61.8% ranks below position 10. Common, but rarely on page one. And when Reddit shows up at all, it is rarely just one thread. 48.4% of the time it takes two or more of the 100 slots, not just one.
When Google shows an AI Overview at all (63,556 of the queries in this corpus), 19.0% of those overviews cite reddit.com at least once. Reddit accounts for 2.4% of every citation inside them.
One thing to watch: OpenAI’s models have leaned heavily on Google for the search queries they fan out during a research-style answer. There are reports that mix is shifting toward more Bing traffic. In this dataset, Bing shows Reddit in just 0.2% of queries. Google shows it in 56.7%. If GPT’s fanout queries keep moving to Bing, Reddit’s odds of showing up as a citation source there could drop.
What the Five AI Models Actually Do With It
Same industries and personas, five different models. Each got a web search tool and was asked to research and recommend the top providers. “Retrieved” means what the model’s search tool pulled back. “Cited” means what actually made it into the final answer.
| Model | Runs with Reddit retrieved |
Reddit share of retrieved |
Runs citing |
Retrieved to cited survival |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| claude-sonnet-5 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
| claude-haiku-4-5 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
| gemini-3-5-flash | 12.6% | 1.6% | 12.7% | 100.0% |
| gpt-5-5 | 96.4% | 24.3% | 2.0% | 2.1% |
| deepseek-v4-pro | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
Across 1,100 claude-sonnet-5 runs and 2,290 search queries, and again across 1,100 claude-haiku-4-5 runs and 4,794 search queries: zero reddit.com URLs, anywhere, in any retrieved result or citation. Confirmed by a raw text search of the response files, not just a parsing check.
My data: 2,200 claude-sonnet-5 + claude-haiku-4-5 fanout runs, 0 occurrences of “reddit.com” in the raw response JSON.
GPT-5 does the opposite. It retrieves Reddit in 96.4% of all 1,100 runs. Reddit makes up 24.3% of everything its search tool pulls back. That is more than any other single host in this dataset, ahead of Wikipedia in second place. But GPT-5 never ranks Reddit high. Average retrieval rank is 46.2, and 0% of GPT’s Reddit retrievals land in the top 10. And it almost never keeps Reddit in the final answer. Only 2.1% of runs where Reddit was retrieved end up citing it. 97.9% of the time, GPT reads the Reddit thread and leaves it out.
Gemini is different again. It retrieves Reddit less than a third as often as GPT does, 12.6% of runs versus 96.4%. But it does not filter what it retrieves. Every single run where Gemini’s search tool returned a Reddit result also cited it.
DeepSeek matches Claude. Zero retrieved or cited Reddit URLs across its own 1,100 runs and 3,106 queries. With one exception. And it is a good one:
Asked to recommend the top 10 streaming video services for a “binge-watching student” persona, deepseek-v4-pro’s top-10 list was: Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple, YouTube, Disney+, and Reddit. Separately, asked for the best sites for a credit-card rewards maximizer, gemini-3-5-flash’s list included Doctor of Credit, Frequent Miler, CardPointers, Cashback Monitor, AwardWallet, Reddit, Upgraded Points, One Mile at a Time, and Bankrate.
My data: 2 of 5,500 fanout runs where reddit.com itself was recommended as a top-10 provider, not just cited as a source.
Google’s Forums Search and Brave’s “Discussions” Section Are Both Just Reddit
Google has a dedicated Forums search mode. Brave’s API returns a separate “discussions” block alongside its normal web results. Both are supposed to be general forum and community content. In practice:
| Google Forums | Brave “discussions” section | |
|---|---|---|
| Reddit’s share of results | 10.5% | 99.5% |
| Queries where Reddit appears at all | 99.9% | 73.1% |
| Avg best rank when present | 1.4 | 1.0 |
| Reddit is the #1 result | 77.7% of all queries | 71.9% of all queries |
Reddit’s raw share of Google’s Forums results is 10.5%. That looks small next to Facebook’s 13.6% of the same pool. But that is volume, not coverage. Facebook shows up less consistently. Reddit shows up in 99.9% of queries, almost always as the top result. The other hosts in that space: Facebook 13.6%, Quora 9.8%, LinkedIn 7.1%, JustAnswer 4.5%, Bogleheads 1.9%, TripAdvisor 1.9%, Course Hero 1.7%, Yelp 1.7%.
The two sources differ in one thing. How much Reddit they show per query. Google’s Forums result picks one thread and moves on. 97.1% of the time, exactly one Reddit result per query. Brave’s discussions section does the opposite:
When Brave’s discussions section has Reddit at all, 48.1% of the time it is not one thread. It is five or more. Google’s Forums search, same underlying content, picks exactly one thread 97.1% of the time.
My data: Google Forums (10,772 files) vs Brave discussions section (2,328 files).
Reddit’s Titles Are Already the Question
I checked every Reddit result’s title for a literal question mark. Rates vary a lot by source:
| Source | Reddit results with a title | Titles containing “?” |
|---|---|---|
| Brave web section | 1,047 | 64.8% |
| Brave discussions section | 11,412 | 60.1% |
| Google Forums | 11,320 | 39.5% |
| Google top-100 | 84,740 | 38.4% |
| Google Short Videos | 670 | 10.6% |
| Google Videos, top 100 | 4,785 | 10.7% |
In plain organic and discussion results, 4 to 6 out of every 10 Reddit titles are phrased as the exact question someone typed. In the video sources, the title is usually a creator’s clip title, not the original thread title. The question-mark rate drops to about 1 in 10.
The Numbers, End to End
- Same keyword list. Reddit in 56.7% of Google’s top-100 results. 0.2% of Bing’s. 0.0% of Google News. Brave, a different query set, shows Reddit in 27.6% of its web results.
- Five AI models got the same web search tool and the same research task. Two of them, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Haiku 4.5, never retrieved a single Reddit URL. GPT-5 retrieves it in 96.4% of runs and cites it in 2.0%. Gemini retrieves it less often but keeps everything it finds. Two different models each once recommended Reddit itself as a top-10 business.
- Google’s Forums search and Brave’s discussions section are both just Reddit with a different label. 99.9% and 99.5%, usually ranked number 1. Google shows one thread per query. Brave shows five or more, 48.1% of the time it has any.
- 61.8% of every Reddit appearance in Google’s top 100 ranks below position 10.
- Reddit thread titles are phrased as questions 38 to 65% of the time in text results. That drops to about 10% in video titles.
All numbers come from Bing, Google top-100, Google Forums, Google News top-100, Google Videos top-100, Google Short Videos, and Brave Search (135,136 SERP files, 9,316,851 pooled results), plus 5,500 successful top_sites_search_fanout runs across claude-sonnet-5, claude-haiku-4-5, gemini-3-5-flash, gpt-5-5, and deepseek-v4-pro (27,168 search queries, 190,241 pooled retrieved sources, 58,434 pooled citations), collected July 2026. Reddit is defined as reddit.com, its subdomains, and redd.it. Every percentage is reproducible from the raw SERP and fanout response data.
NOTE: I posted on X and LinkedIn yesterday saying this was from 350k searches. I got that mixed up with the number of LLM prompts that’s part of this research. LLM prompts are over 350k. This has over 125k searches.