| Media kit page | For journalists and PR: the findings as story angles |
|---|---|
| Original blog post | Reddit's Use Across AI Search. And What's Reddit's Future if ChatGPT+Web Search Moves to Bing? |
The question
Reddit has been part of AI search visibility from the start. Reports that ChatGPT was using Bing for some web searches made me want to understand what might change. I looked at how often Reddit appears in search results, how often AI models retrieve it, and how often they cite it.
I collected the data in July 2026 across the same 100 industries: 135,136 search result files from Google, Bing and Brave, containing 9,316,851 results, plus 5,500 AI search runs. That is 1,100 runs each from claude-sonnet-5, claude-haiku-4-5, gemini-3-5-flash, gpt-5-5 and deepseek-v4-pro. Each model had a web search tool and was asked to research and recommend the top providers.
Reddit across search engines
| Source | Queries with Reddit anywhere | Reddit share of results | Queries with Reddit in the top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google (top 100) | 56.7% | 1.2% | 35.8% |
| Bing (top 10) | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.2% |
| Google Forums (top 10) | 99.9% | 10.5% | 99.9% |
| Google News (top 100) | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Google Videos (top 100) | 21.1% | 0.4% | 1.9% |
| Brave web (top 20) | 27.6% | 2.3% | 14.3% |
The Brave results use the searches claude-sonnet-5 wrote itself. The other sources use the same keyword list, so keep that difference in mind when comparing them.
- Out of 816,316 pooled Google News results, none came from Reddit.
- When Reddit appears in Google’s top 100, 61.8% of its appearances are below position 10. In 48.4% of those queries, Reddit takes two or more of the 100 slots.
- Of the 63,556 queries that produced a Google AI Overview, 19.0% of the overviews cited reddit.com at least once. Reddit accounts for 2.4% of all citations in those overviews.
- Google Forums and Brave’s discussions section are mostly Reddit. In Google Forums, Reddit appears in 99.9% of queries and ranks first in 77.7%. In Brave’s discussions section, it accounts for 99.5% of results.
- In text results, 38% to 65% of Reddit thread titles are phrased as questions. In video results, that falls to about 10%.
Reddit across five AI models
| Model | Runs that retrieved Reddit | Reddit share of retrieved sources | Of those runs, share that cited Reddit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 5 | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 12.6% | 1.6% | 100% |
| GPT-5.5 | 96.4% | 24.3% | 2.1% |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | 0.0% | 0.0% | n/a |
- Across 2,200 Claude runs, I found no reddit.com URL in any retrieved result or citation. I also searched the raw response files to confirm it.
- GPT-5.5 retrieved Reddit in 96.4% of runs. Reddit accounted for 24.3% of everything its search tool returned, more than any other host in the dataset. But its average retrieval rank was 46.2, and none of the Reddit results were in the top 10. When GPT retrieved Reddit, it left it out of the final answer 97.9% of the time.
- Gemini retrieved Reddit much less often. But every run that retrieved a Reddit result also cited it.
- In two of the 5,500 runs, the model recommended reddit.com itself as a top 10 provider: DeepSeek for streaming video services, and Gemini for credit card rewards sites.
What a move to Bing would mean
OpenAI’s models have relied heavily on Google for the searches they run during research-style answers. The post discusses reports that more of those searches are moving to Bing. In this data, Bing returned Reddit for 0.2% of queries, while Google returned it for 56.7%. Those figures cover Bing’s top 10 and Google’s top 100, respectively. If ChatGPT continues moving searches to Bing, Reddit could have fewer opportunities to appear as a source.
What the study does not show
- I measured what the search tools retrieved and what the models cited. That does not tell us how Reddit affects recommendations for a particular brand.
- Brave uses a different query set from the other sources. Its figures are not a like-for-like comparison.