“What’s the best CRM for a small team?”
A buyer types that into ChatGPT. Four seconds later they have a shortlist. Here is the part most marketing teams have not priced in: that shortlist was not assembled from the vendors’ websites. More of it came from Reddit than from anywhere else.
I wanted to know how lopsided that really is, so I measured it. I took 25 real “best software” buyer queries across 8 categories, and for each one I pulled the ranked list of sources ChatGPT and Google’s AI actually cite. Then I counted where Reddit landed.
One number stood out above the rest: on ChatGPT, Reddit was the single most-cited source on every query I tested, about 30% of all the sources in its answers. No brand’s own site was close. Neither was any review platform, or any news outlet.
Why I ran this#
The advice going around is “you need to be visible in AI search.” True, but visible where? AI answers are stitched together from sources, and if you do not know which sources the models lean on, you are optimizing blind. So instead of guessing, I measured which domains actually show up as citations behind software recommendations, on the two surfaces that matter most: ChatGPT and Google’s AI.
How I measured it#
On August 19, 2026, I queried the DataForSEO LLM Mentions database for 25 B2B software buyer queries (“best CRM software,” “best project management software,” “best email marketing software,” and so on) across 8 categories. For each query I pulled the ranked source domains behind the answers, on two platforms: ChatGPT and Google’s AI (AI Overviews and AI Mode). Then I recorded Reddit’s rank and its share of the sources.
It is one measured run, US and English, so treat the exact percentages as directional. The caveats are at the bottom, and they are real. But the pattern was not subtle.
Finding 1: Reddit is the source ChatGPT cites most#
Across the 25 queries, Reddit was the #1 cited source in ChatGPT’s answers on every single one. It made up about 30% of all the sources ChatGPT cited, which is more than double the second-place source, Wikipedia, at 14%. After that come the tech press and the jobs boards: TechRadar, Forbes, Indeed.
Sit with that. The single biggest input to ChatGPT’s software recommendations is a public forum where strangers argue about tools. Not the polished comparison page your team spent a quarter on. The Reddit thread where someone asked the same question two years ago and forty people answered.
Finding 2: On Google’s AI, YouTube and Reddit run the show#
I ran the identical 25 queries against Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. The winner flips, but the theme holds: the top two sources are both places people post, not places brands publish. YouTube was first, and Reddit was second on 24 of the 25 queries. Everything else, including the vendors’ own domains, trailed well behind.
Finding 3: It is every category, not one fluke#
This is not one noisy category dragging the average. Reddit was the #1 source ChatGPT cited in all eight software categories I tested, from 26.6% in HR and recruiting up to 33.7% in customer support. Across all 25 queries and both engines, there was not a single question where Reddit fell out of the top three sources.
What this means for your brand#
Here is the uncomfortable implication. A large slice of your AI visibility now depends on a website you do not own and cannot publish to on demand. You can ship the best docs and comparison pages on the internet and still lose the AI recommendation to a Reddit thread you have never read.
That does not mean astroturfing. Reddit communities are good at spotting and punishing marketing accounts, and getting caught is a real brand risk, so that road is a trap. The durable moves are slower and honest:
- Know your number. Find out what share of voice you hold in AI answers for your category and how you stack up against the competitors cited alongside you. If Reddit is a third of ChatGPT’s inputs, your presence there is measurable, not a vibe.
- Show up where buyers already are. Answer real questions in the subreddits your customers use, the authentic off-page work that earns citations over time. Let honest reviews and real employees carry the weight.
- Track it per engine. ChatGPT and Google cite different things, so a win on one is not a win on the other. Track your AI citations on both.
The caveats, out loud#
Honesty is the whole point of measuring, so here are the limits. This is one run on one day; LLM outputs and citation databases shift, so treat the percentages as directional, not gospel. ChatGPT’s shares are a clean split of all its source citations, but Google’s per-source counts are response-level and do not sum to 100%, so I report Google by rank rather than a percentage you can line up next to ChatGPT’s. A few of the 25 queries pulled in loosely related topics through keyword matching, and Reddit still led those. And the scope is US, English, and B2B software buyer intent; other locales and categories will differ.
None of that changes the headline. Ask AI which software to buy, and more than any brand, any reviewer, and any reporter, it reaches for Reddit. The full numbers, every chart, and the method are on the data page, free to cite.
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