Decoding Google’s Role in Reddit’s Recent ChatGPT Citation Dip

The world of AI search is moving fast, and this week’s news is all about Reddit and OpenAI. Or so it seems! In my view, it’s really about Google. Let’s take a step back to understand what’s going on.

The news: Reddit’s stock drops, following its dip in ChatGPT citations.

As people increasingly shift from Google to AI search, Reddit has been a highly cited source across large language models (LLMs). However, this week saw a barrage of media headlines highlighting new third-party data — from PromptWatch and others —  showing that ChatGPT has been citing Reddit far less in recent weeks.

(Source: PromptWatch)

Investor concerns about Reddit’s diminished ChatGPT citations led to the company’s stock sliding. Reddit’s stock price fell from $240.11 USD at the close on September 26, 2025, to $205.50 USD at the close on October 2, 2025. That is a 14.4% price drop over the course of five days.

Why is Reddit being cited less in ChatGPT results?

Google made it harder to crawl its search results, leading OpenAI to use Reddit’s API, which may be more costly.

Let’s dig into this.

Around September 10, Google removed the num=100 parameter from its search. Until recently, adding ‘?num=100’ to a Google search URL showed the top 100 results instead of just 10. This was widely used by data companies scraping Google search results – including providers that OpenAI reportedly buys data from. OpenAI doesn’t crawl Google directly but purchases search data from third parties, which relied on the now-removed parameter.

Now that the parameter no longer works, most tools are forced to focus on the top 10, or perhaps the top 20, search results. According to Ahrefs, 57.8% of Reddit’s keywords rank outside the top 20 search results.

So, the reason Reddit dropped in ChatGPT visibility around September 10 is no accident. It’s because Google shipped defenses against AI competitors scraping their data.

As a result, I suspect ChatGPT runs fewer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) crawls to Reddit.  A RAG crawl refers to a web crawler being used to collect data from websites for the specific purpose of enriching answers with reasoning.

While OpenAI has access to Reddit’s API, the company likely uses it for training data rather than for reasoning answers. Live retrieval is optimized around sources that are lower-cost, easier to refresh, and consistently structured. This helps reconcile why Reddit can have an API deal yet still see visible citations drop.

In data from Profound, a G2 partner, we found that Wikipedia’s visibility increased as Reddit’s dropped. Wikipedia likely filled the gap because it consistently ranks in Google’s top results and provides canonical, structured content, which retrieval systems favor.

There are several forces at play simultaneously, making the AI search landscape an interesting one to watch right now!

At the time of this article’s publication, there is no publicly confirmed change from OpenAI or Google specific to Reddit. While it’s unclear where things will head next with Reddit’s citations, one thing we know for certain is that change is inevitable. And change is happening fast! 

Here are just a few other trends I’ve observed over the past few weeks across the AI search landscape:

• Reddit proposed a new deal to OpenAI and Alphabet that includes dynamic pricing based on AI answer inclusion and Google users becoming Reddit contributors by default.
• OpenAI just launched direct checkout on ChatGPT, which will give us more data about how people are using ChatGPT because attribution will be much easier.
• User-generated content (UGC) still wins in LLM results, despite the Reddit news this week. Reddit is still the most cited UGC platform by far. And, software marketplace G2 — featuring over 3 million reviews —  is the 4th-ranked digital tech and software source on ChatGPT, following Wikipedia, Reddit, and TechRadar. This is according to the August 2025 AI Visibility Index Study by SEMRUSH Enterprise.

Follow me on LinkedIn for more of my perspectives on AI search and how businesses can adapt and optimize their SEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) strategies.