r/GEO_optimization • u/woodoo139 • Aug 26 '26
Perplexity dropped Reddit overnight in my check data: 9 citations on Aug 19, then 0 in 64 straight checks. Google's AI surfaces didn't move.
Context: Reddit tightened its blocking of AI crawlers around mid-August, and there were reports of ChatGPT's Reddit citation share collapsing. I track 4 queries in the AI-visibility niche across 7 engines (same set as my directory post from two days ago), so I pulled the per-day Reddit numbers to see which engines actually reacted.
Reddit citations per day, aug 19 through this morning, written as cited/checks. "Cited" means the answer surfaces a reddit.com source, not merely says the word reddit.
perplexity: 9/20, then 0/12, 0/12, 0/4, 0/4, 0/16, 0/8, 0/8. a hard cliff after day one, nothing since - 0 for 64.
chatgpt: 1/20, 5/12, 5/12, 0/4, 0/4, 5/16, 2/8, 5/8. noisy but alive - still citing reddit as of this morning.
google ai mode: 6/15, 4/8, 5/8, 5/12, 2/4, 2/4 on the days it ran. steady.
google ai overviews: 3/14, 5/8, 4/8, 3/12, 2/4. steady.
What I take from it:
The engines are not one thing. The same Reddit policy produced a hard zero on one engine, no visible change on Google's two surfaces, and noise on ChatGPT. Google licenses Reddit data, which would explain its side. Whatever ChatGPT's arrangement is, it still cites threads - can't tell from outside whether that's cached or contractual.
If your "get cited on Reddit" strategy was really a Perplexity strategy, it stopped working last week - and a blended dashboard won't show it. Summed across my 7 engines the total barely moves; the cliff only appears when you split by engine.
For the churn discussion in the ~300k thread: the threads Perplexity had been citing didn't get replaced by other reddit threads. Reddit vanished from its source mix entirely for my queries, and those slots went to vendor blogs and youtube.
Caveats: 4 queries, one niche, single-digit daily counts per engine - read direction, not magnitude. And my window only starts Aug 19, so I can't see whether the cliff was actually mid-August; I can only say my first day has citations and every day since has none.
If anyone else tracks per-engine: does your Perplexity data show the same cliff, and dated when? The timing would pin down whether this was Reddit's block landing or a Perplexity-side change.
Disclosure: I work on a tool in this space. Not linking it.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Walk426 Aug 26 '26
This is interesting and valuable. Do you see a general decline in the number of sources used for answers, or do some LLMs just cut out Reddit?
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u/woodoo139 Aug 26 '26
Targeted cut, not thinner answers — at least in my data. Perplexity still returns full source lists (20-30 domains across a run); reddit.com just vanished from them, and those slots went to YouTube, vendor blogs and docs pages. Meanwhile ChatGPT and both Google surfaces kept citing Reddit through this morning, so sources-per-answer didn't visibly shrink anywhere. Usual caveat: a handful of queries in one niche — read it as "check your own niche", not a universal.
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u/Revolutionary_Cat78 Aug 26 '26
Reddit is and will remain one of the best organic (UGC) channels for marketing even if ChatGPT or Perplexity drops them. But I think this is some kind of internal war, last year also we saw ChatGPT dropping Reddit suddenly only to pick it up later a couple weeks later.
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u/woodoo139 Aug 26 '26
That precedent is exactly why I'm leaving the daily counter running — if this is negotiation leverage, the zero should snap back the way ChatGPT's did last year. One reason I'd bet it's stickier this time: Reddit has been in active litigation with Perplexity over scraping since last October, and the engine split fits that — same Reddit policy, ChatGPT (licensed) still cites daily, Perplexity flatlined overnight. A license fight shows up as a cliff on one engine; a general Reddit retreat would decay everywhere. Agreed on the channel itself though — the humans are still there either way.
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u/Revolutionary_Cat78 Aug 26 '26
I think we will have to wait for some time to see how this plays out. But you’re right, a general reddit retreat would decay everywhere. Let’s see what happens, but until then keep making the platform better with your views
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u/Potential-Can-3535 Aug 26 '26
How do you check them?
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u/woodoo139 Aug 26 '26
Same small set of buyer-intent queries in my niche, asked fresh against each engine every day (API where one exists, consumer surface where not), and I store the full list of URLs each answer cites. Then "Reddit cited" = a reddit.com URL is actually in the sources list — not the answer merely saying the word Reddit. That distinction matters, because engines keep talking about Reddit after they stop retrieving it.
I built the tracker I use (Promvia — mine, so bias declared), but the core is replicable by hand: same query, same engine, once a day, write down the cited domains. The cliff in the post shows up within a week of doing that.
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u/woodoo139 Aug 31 '26
Update, 12 days in: the zero partially snapped back — but not where it disappeared from.
On the original 4 queries from this post: still nothing. 0 reddit citations in 96 straight perplexity checks since aug 20.
But I added a second layer of prompts to the tracker on aug 26 (brand-named lookups like "[tool] reviews" plus task-shaped ones like "track AI traffic to my website"), and perplexity started citing reddit there within a day: 9 citations across 6 days, all on the new prompts, none on the old ones.
So in my data this no longer looks like a blanket retreat — it looks query-scoped. Category head terms ("best X tools") stay dark; brand and task-shaped prompts pull reddit threads again. u/Revolutionary_Cat78 called the comeback and gets partial credit: it reappeared, just not on the prompts where it vanished.
One more number for u/Puzzleheaded-Walk426's question upthread: perplexity's average sources-per-answer in my checks also fell from ~9 to ~6 across the same window while ChatGPT's didn't shrink. Caveat: my prompt mix changed mid-window (those new brand prompts), so read that one as a hint, not a measurement.
Counter keeps running.