LLMs’ strengths as search tools are well-documented. They offer unprecedented personalization based on user feedback. They use recall to infer our needs with impressive accuracy. And they can comb and vet the internet to respond to a query in the time it takes us to type the query itself. They do what people can’t.
But just like people, they do have favorite places to find reliable consumer feedback and product recommendations. And just like the billions of people who visit its highly indexed forums every month, ChatGPT’s current favorite research source across most product categories is Reddit.
Read on to understand our research into Reddit’s current influence on ChatGPT. We’ll also discuss variances we see in another popular LLM, and why brands should anticipate the emergence of new retrieval methods, citation patterns, and favored authority sources that overtake Reddit as our AI shopping usage evolves. Today’s data points matter, but they all indicate that new waves of change are guaranteed. That means every brand’s products require a more holistic agentic search strategy that can adapt for tomorrow.
ChatGPT seeking answers on Reddit is nothing new, but our testing identified a major spike in its reliance on Reddit as an authority in product discovery beginning in early March. To understand how major, we looked at per-category sources considered and surfaced by the LLM. We found a 2.5x increase in sources considered, while the number of Reddit sources actually surfaced by ChatGPT exploded by more than 30x. In some cases, about a third of URLs surfaced for a product category linked to Reddit threads.
It’s worth noting that while Reddit was consistently a top performer, we found that the overall citation mix changes across product categories. Take Beauty & Personal Care and Food & Beverage for example. Wikipedia and the online storefronts for Target and Walmart all make the top ten cited sources in both categories, but their ranked positions vary. The other spots in the top ten are occupied by sources that ChatGPT has identified as authorities in their space: Sephora, Ulta, and Nordstrom make the cut for Beauty & Personal Care, while we see Whole Foods, Kroger, and Nutiva in Food & Beverage. Reddit may be the loudest voice in ChatGPT’s ear today, but there are still others to consider, and many of them will be unique to your product’s category.
Our testing also found that the metrics informing popularity and visibility on Reddit don’t apply in ChatGPT’s process. The typical Reddit user browses the site’s home page or navigates straight to a hyper-focused “subreddit” forum dedicated to a topic that interests them. In either case, they’ll see threads of user-generated content and conversation sorted by popularity according to the number of “upvotes” given by users to signal the thread’s value.
ChatGPT doesn’t operate like the standard Reddit user, and this impacts what it sees. Because its method resembles traditional web search, the LLM sidesteps the process that shows humans the community’s most visible and popular content. Instead, it retrieves URLs linking directly to discussion threads with titles that offer keyword matches and indexability. This effectively erases any meaningful difference in visibility between posts with 10 upvotes and posts with 100 or more. A key mechanic that drives Reddit’s utility for the first-person user is discarded.
Brands have to grapple with these realities today. Reddit is wielding outsize influence over the search results that ChatGPT uses for research. New AEO strategies that account for this influence can’t simply mirror social media strategies, because the LLM doesn’t weigh engagement with a piece of Reddit content when it assesses its value to the user. To effectively reach humans through ChatGPT, don’t focus on human use cases and their user experience. Think like AI.
For an important reminder that nothing in the AI search landscape is simple, let’s turn to Gemini. Focused testing of the Google-owned ChatGPT competitor found that its search behavior is far from mimicking OpenAI’s LLM. In fact, three of the four Gemini models we tested cited product review videos from Google’s YouTube platform more than any other source. Reddit links represented a fraction of the presence allowed by ChatGPT’s model. A second LLM, a second source mix, a second system of AI-measured authority across product categories.
Sound AEO strategy is challenging to formulate because there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Different widely adopted platforms require different approaches to suit their unique methods of gathering and vetting information to address user queries. There are nuances across product categories in how a given LLM weighs sources or uses them for product discovery versus validation. And none of this is fixed over time; ChatGPT’s relationship to Reddit sources changed in early March and will change again.
Brands need to know the relevant sources in their category, how they’re being used, and how to build content strategies around these variables while accounting for differences in popular AI tools. Novi can help identify the source mix that matters for your products and the signals brands need to strengthen across Reddit, YouTube, DTC, retailer PDPs, reviews, and third-party content. AI authority is not solidified, and trust is constantly shifting. We make sure that you can shift with it.
