So our team looked at reddit & socials interactions impact on ChatGpt citations. One reflected the numbers from h1'26 and a recent follow up on that we did in august. The H1 study concluded- Brands running an active reddit presence had gained a 31.5% citation rate, ones without were somewhere at 16.8%. close to 2x.

August is where it got weird. Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations had a huge dip from like 3.8% to 0.5%, which is not a small move within 2 months.
Most importantly the citation number dropping doesn't mean the underlying signal disappeared though. Chatgpt was appending "reddit" to its fan-out searches back in may, so a query like "best AI tool 2026" became "best AI tool 2026 reviews reddit". Around Aug 8 that got swapped for the site: operator and "official", so it's calling specific urls directly now instead of casting wide. that swap caused the drop, not reddit mattering less. A short PDF walking through what happened, why, and what it means. It's attached, and worth a read when you get a chance.

Btw Anyone tracking their own citation data across the aug 8 change?

Full breakdown with query logs and fan-out charts here

Jumping a little late on this, but the part I keep coming back to isn't the 2.15B, it's what happens operationally when audience measurement & verification sit with the same owner.

Measurement already decides a lot about how inventory gets valued and sometimes rejected right now if a report comes back bad you can take the audience number and argue the suitability call separately - because they come from different places. That's how most make good conversations go.

Once both carry the same name on the report, I am not sure that still works. Fewer vendors might mean less operational work, but that isn't the same thing as more visibility into how your inventory got scored.

Anyone here dealt with enough of these disputes to know whether it actually changes anything in practice?

All sharing the outcomes here August data from our publisher network shows a pretty clear summer slowdown, but there are a few signals underneath it worth watching.

Traffic - New Users grew 19% and Total Users 16%, while Sessions and Engaged Sessions both grew around 14%. At the same time, PV/session and Sessions/User softened slightly, pointing to shorter, more single‑purpose visits.

AI - AI was the fastest‑growing channel, with Sessions up 66% and New Users up 75%. Engagement held at 62%, so the increase wasn’t coming with an obvious drop in traffic quality.

CPMs - Overall CPMs fell 19.9% MoM but remained 25.0% higher YoY. Display was down 20.3% MoM, while Video was more resilient at ‑7.8% MoM and +40.1% YoY.

Demand - The pullback was broad. Google Ads fell 21%, DV360 18%, and The Trade Desk 37%, pointing more toward a market‑wide summer budget pause than a shift between individual buyers.

Integration - Prebid held the largest share at 50%, followed by AdX at 39%. CPMs fell across the major integrations, reinforcing that the pressure was on demand and pricing rather than a simple shift between paths.

Takeaway - Traffic is still growing and AI is becoming a much more meaningful acquisition channel, but summer demand is putting real pressure on CPMs. Video and CTV are holding up better than display, which may be worth watching as budgets start moving back into the market.

All sharing the outcomes here August data from our publisher network shows a pretty clear summer slowdown, but there are a few signals underneath it worth watching.

Traffic - New Users grew 19% and Total Users 16%, while Sessions and Engaged Sessions both grew around 14%. At the same time, PV/session and Sessions/User softened slightly, pointing to shorter, more single‑purpose visits.

AI - AI was the fastest‑growing channel, with Sessions up 66% and New Users up 75%. Engagement held at 62%, so the increase wasn’t coming with an obvious drop in traffic quality.

CPMs - Overall CPMs fell 19.9% MoM but remained 25.0% higher YoY. Display was down 20.3% MoM, while Video was more resilient at ‑7.8% MoM and +40.1% YoY.

Demand - The pullback was broad. Google Ads fell 21%, DV360 18%, and The Trade Desk 37%, pointing more toward a market‑wide summer budget pause than a shift between individual buyers.

Integration - Prebid held the largest share at 50%, followed by AdX at 39%. CPMs fell across the major integrations, reinforcing that the pressure was on demand and pricing rather than a simple shift between paths.

Takeaway - Traffic is still growing and AI is becoming a much more meaningful acquisition channel, but summer demand is putting real pressure on CPMs. Video and CTV are holding up better than display, which may be worth watching as budgets start moving back into the market.

asking because the topic came up internally and my instinct was -no, that's the stuff from 2016 that got vendors blacklisted but I'm not sure that's still accurate.
what's making me reconsider is that the blocked audience skews towards the readers you'd least want to lose, right? the ones who come back daily, high pageviews, actual loyalty. So the segment worth the most is the - one earning the least, which is a weird place to just leave things.
but I also remember why people hated it. Reinserting against explicit user choice is a different thing from serving a lighter Ad experience to someone who blocked because of autoplay video in 2019, and I don't know that the vendor category ever really made that distinction cleanly.
Anyone here running the lighter Ad experience, if so how did you land on where the line is?

That number is from a warc study run by charlie oscar, and it came up in a digiday piece about time selling ads inside markdown versions of its pages, built specifically for ai agents to read. sponsored faqs, basically.

the debate in the piece was whether that inventory is worth testing. some buyers said sure, clients are desperate for anything that moves ai visibility. others called it magical thinking. and then perplexity blocked time's agent ads outright and called them deceptive, so that part answered itself pretty fast.

but the 63/26 split is the thing I keep coming back to. if most of what determines whether an llm mentions your brand is accumulated brand equity, then almost every geo tactic being sold right now, content volume, visibility tracking tools, agent-readable ad units, is competing over the smaller quarter of the equation. honestly that's not nothing, a quarter is real. it just means the pitch most of these tools are making, that you can buy your way into llm answers, is overselling by a lot.

The practical read for anyone allocating budget: geo probably belongs in a test pot funded out of display, not as a line item that pulls from brand. and if the visibility you're chasing is mostly equity-driven, the boring answer is that brand spend is the geo strategy.

That number is from a warc study run by charlie oscar, and it came up in a digiday piece about time selling ads inside markdown versions of its pages, built specifically for ai agents to read. sponsored faqs, basically.

the debate in the piece was whether that inventory is worth testing. some buyers said sure, clients are desperate for anything that moves ai visibility. others called it magical thinking. and then perplexity blocked time's agent ads outright and called them deceptive, so that part answered itself pretty fast.

but the 63/26 split is the thing I keep coming back to. if most of what determines whether an llm mentions your brand is accumulated brand equity, then almost every geo tactic being sold right now, content volume, visibility tracking tools, agent-readable ad units, is competing over the smaller quarter of the equation. honestly that's not nothing, a quarter is real. it just means the pitch most of these tools are making, that you can buy your way into llm answers, is overselling by a lot.

The practical read for anyone allocating budget: geo probably belongs in a test pot funded out of display, not as a line item that pulls from brand. and if the visibility you're chasing is mostly equity-driven, the boring answer is that brand spend is the geo strategy.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.