Reddit’s Dead. Now What?
Last week Reddit’s visibility in ChatGPT fell off a cliff.
According to Promptwatch, Reddit had been sitting at around 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations. Between 14 – 17 August, that dropped to just 0.52%.
That’s an 86% drop in a matter of days.
Now, there is a caveat here. Promptwatch themselves have said they can’t completely rule out a data collection issue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit’s visibility comes back up somewhat.
But I actually think arguing over whether the number is 86%, 60% or 30% misses the point.
Because if you’ve built your entire AI Search strategy around Reddit, this is exactly the problem.
Reddit isn’t dead
Despite the title, I don’t think Reddit is dead.
Far from it.
It’s still one of the biggest sources of genuine human opinion online and LLMs still use it.
What I do think is dying is the way a lot of marketers have been using it.
Over the last year, as everyone realised how heavily ChatGPT and other LLMs were pulling from Reddit, the obvious play emerged:
Create accounts.
Post comments.
Mention brands.
Get picked up by LLMs.
Repeat.
And for a while, it worked.
We know because we did it too.
But we actually retired Reddit as a standalone service in July, before this latest ChatGPT change happened.
The reason was pretty simple: it was becoming increasingly obvious that doing Reddit at volume wasn’t sustainable.
Reddit is actively fighting this stuff
This part seems to have been missed in a lot of the conversation.
Reddit isn’t sitting there happily watching marketers fill the platform with comments designed to influence ChatGPT.
They’re actively trying to stop it.
In July, Reddit confirmed it was using LLMs itself to detect spam, specifically calling out stealth marketing designed to influence AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini.
They say they’re now blocking around 23 million spam views per day and catching roughly 25,000 new spammy posts and comments every day.
Then you’ve got moderators and BotBouncer on top of that.
Accounts can get flagged, comments disappear, entire batches of posts can be wiped out and increasingly it doesn’t even matter whether the individual comment looks spammy.
The account itself can be the problem.
We’ve seen this ourselves.
And this is where the economics of Reddit marketing start getting pretty stupid.
If your strategy is basically:
Post > get cited > get deleted > replace it > get cited again
That’s not really a strategy.
You’re just renting visibility until either Reddit or the LLM decides otherwise.
The latest update with ChatGPT dropping Reddit Citations showed the bigger problem.
This is the bit I find most interesting.
Reddit didn’t collapse everywhere.
Its visibility across Google’s AI products declined much more gradually.
ChatGPT basically just changed how much it wanted to use Reddit overnight and suddenly a tactic that loads of brands and agencies had piled into became significantly less valuable.
That’s the risk with building an AI Search strategy around any single platform.
Reddit itself is actually experiencing a version of the same problem.
It recently reported huge growth $805m in quarterly revenue and more than half a billion weekly active users but US daily active users dipped slightly, with management pointing partly towards volatile search referrals.
So if even Reddit can’t control how AI platforms distribute traffic to Reddit why do you think your brand can?
So what do we do now?
I don’t think the answer is finding the next Reddit.
And I think this is where a lot of the conversation around AI Search is going wrong.
People are looking for hacks.
First it was “get mentioned on Reddit.”
Then it was “get into listicles.”
Then it’ll be something else.
In my opinion, AI Search is much closer to a combination of SEO and Digital PR than it is some completely new marketing discipline.
You need to understand what sources LLMs are using for the questions your customers are actually asking.
Then work backwards.
At Minty, we’re generally seeing those sources fall into four buckets:
Your own website
Content that directly answers the questions people are asking AI assistants and is structured in a way that can actually be retrieved and cited.
Third-party recommendations
Listicles, comparison pages, directories and “best X” articles.
Particularly important when someone is asking an LLM which company/product/service they should choose.
Social and forums
Reddit is still part of this.
But so are YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn and niche industry communities.
The important distinction is that Reddit is an input not the sole strategy.
Editorial coverage
Publications, journalists and authoritative websites that AI platforms already trust and cite.
This is also why I think the line between Digital PR, SEO and AI Search is going to become increasingly blurred.
We’re already seeing this work
We’ve recently been testing this approach with a client in the legal space.
Rather than starting with:
“How do we get them mentioned on Reddit?”
We started with:
“What is ChatGPT actually citing for the questions this client wants to appear for?”
We found competitor content being repeatedly retrieved for commercially important questions.
So we created something better.
Within the first 30 days, that new page had been retrieved 15 times across the prompts we’re tracking and cited inline 9 times.
More importantly, it wasn’t just appearing for informational stuff.
It started appearing for questions like:
- “Which company should I use to extend my leasehold in England?”
- “Recommend a specialist lease extension company.”
- “What’s the best lease extension service in the UK?”
Those last three are effectively leads.
Someone is asking an AI assistant who should I give my money to?
Snapshot shows number of retrievals one new article is getting within 30 days
It’s still early, so I’m not going to pretend one page over 30 days is some definitive case study but this is just one of many examples of the GEO work we’ve been rolling out for clients which took some time to demonstrate results with – but we’re well on track now.
But it shows where I think this is heading.
We didn’t need 30 Reddit accounts.
We didn’t need to dodge moderators.
We looked at what the models already trusted and built something that deserved to be there.
AI Search needs to be wider than Reddit
The Reddit drop will probably recover to some extent and Reddit will almost certainly continue to matter for AI Search.
But I wouldn’t build a strategy around it.
The way we’re approaching AI Search now is pretty simple:
Track the prompts that actually matter commercially > understand what sources are influencing those answers > work out where you’re missing > earn visibility across those sources.
Sometimes that’s SEO.
Sometimes it’s Digital PR.
Sometimes it’s a listicle.
Sometimes it genuinely is Reddit.
Usually, it’s a mixture of all of them.
That’s less exciting than discovering a new AI Search hack.
But it’s also a lot harder for an algorithm update on a random Thursday to wipe out.
