Why Brands Need to Care About Reddit (If They Care About AI Visibility)
Personally, I bloody love reddit and spend way too much time on it, but most brands have a Reddit strategy that looks something like this: crickets.
Maybe someone in the marketing team checks it occasionally. Maybe there's a vague plan to "do something with Reddit" sitting in a backlog somewhere.
That needs to change, and soon, because the search landscape has already started shifting beneath us. According to Rob Gaige, Reddit's Global Head of Insights, 91% of people who discover a product on another platform pass through Reddit specifically to validate it before buying. This means Reddit isn't just another social forum; it’s a critical trust layer that sits directly between your marketing and your customer's wallet.
But the shift goes deeper than just human behaviour, as AI models are now following the exact same path. We used Ahrefs Brand Radar to analyse which domains get cited across three major AI platforms; Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini, focusing on 10 Australian B2C industries. What we found was a consistent pattern where Reddit ranked as one of the most referenced sources across almost all of them.
If AI visibility is anywhere on your roadmap for 2026, Reddit simply has to be part of the conversation.
The Key Findings
Before we dive into the specific industry data, here's a snapshot of what the data showed:
- Reddit is a top 3 cited source on ChatGPT in every single Australian B2C vertical we analysed, actually claiming the #1 spot in 7 out of 10.
- When looking at Google AI Overviews, Reddit ranks #2 or #3 in most consumer categories, sitting behind giants like YouTube and Wikipedia.
- On Gemini, Reddit typically lands between #3 and #5, which means it’s consistently outranking major Australian brands in their own backyard.
- The only categories where Reddit gets pushed down are health and pharmacy, where all three platforms understandably prioritise official medical authorities instead.
- Most strikingly, Reddit outranks household names like JB Hi-Fi, Carsales, TripAdvisor, The Iconic, IKEA, and Chemist Warehouse as an AI source in their own categories.
- This isn't just a quirk of one specific algorithm; the pattern holds across every platform, suggesting that Reddit is structurally embedded in how AI answers are built.
What We Measured (and What the Ranking Means)
When you ask an AI a question, it doesn't just generate an answer from thin air; instead, it pulls from sources like websites, articles, and forums to construct its response. While some AI platforms cite those sources directly, others use them as training data that shapes the entire perspective of the answer.
Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks these specific domains to see which ones get cited as sources in AI-generated responses. When we say Reddit is "#1" in a category, it means Reddit was referenced more often than any other website when that AI platform generated answers about that topic. The "responses" number is the cumulative count of individual AI-generated answers that cited that domain.
So, if Reddit has 4,546 citations in the restaurants category on ChatGPT, that means 4,546 AI-generated answers about restaurants in Australia pulled information from Reddit, effectively carrying more weight than TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, or any restaurant's own website. This is incredibly significant because those AI answers are increasingly where your customers are getting their purchasing information from.
The Data Across Three Platforms
We pulled cited domain data across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini for 10 Australian B2C verticals, from electronics and fashion through to restaurants, automotive, and real estate. The chart below shows the story on ChatGPT, but the pattern holds across platforms.
On ChatGPT, Reddit is the #1 cited source in 7 out of 10 verticals. It outranks JB Hi-Fi in electronics, Uber Eats in restaurants, Carsales in automotive, The Iconic in fashion, and IKEA in furniture. These aren't small niche brands. They're category leaders with massive marketing budgets, and Reddit is beating them all for AI citations.
On Google AI Overviews, Reddit consistently lands in the #2-3 range across most non-YMYL categories, sitting ahead of brands like Bunnings, Hipages, Myer, and TripAdvisor. On Gemini it's more variable, typically #3-5, but still present in almost every vertical.
The two exceptions are health and real estate on Google AI Overviews, where YMYL protections push Reddit down in favour of government health authorities, banks, and established financial comparison sites. On ChatGPT, even those protections don't fully apply. Reddit is still #3 in pharmacy (behind Healthline and WebMD) and #1 in real estate (ahead of REA Group and every bank).
The Pattern
When looking at the broader picture, a few things jump out as clear indicators of where search is heading.
- ChatGPT loves Reddit:Frequently using it as the #1 cited source in 7 out of 10 verticals. This includes high-competition categories where you'd expect industry-specific sites to dominate, yet on ChatGPT, Reddit beats them all. Meanwhile…
- Google AI Overviews:Is more conservative, typically positioning Reddit at #2 or #3 behind YouTube and Wikipedia, which suggests Google is applying more editorial judgment about brand authority.
- Gemini:Tends to sit in the middle, ranking Reddit around #3-5, which mirrors how Google's own model aligns with the quality signals we see in AI Overviews.
- The YMYL exception: Is real in pharmacy and health, real estate breaks this pattern entirely; despite being a high-stakes financial decision, Reddit remains #1 on ChatGPT and #4 on Gemini for property-related queries, suggesting that users (and models) crave raw experience over corporate listings.
Crucially, this landscape is getting harder, not easier.
Recent research from LLM Scout found that citation density is dropping across all major models, with some platforms showing a citations per answer drop of up to 65% in the last few months of 2025. As AI answers include fewer outbound links, the competition for those few remaining slots becomes fierce. The fact that Reddit is still consistently cited while total slots are shrinking proves it has earned a permanent seat at the table.
Why AI Models Keep Citing Reddit
This isn't random; there are structural reasons Reddit keeps showing up in the eyes of an LLM. AI models are built to prioritise authentic, experience-based content (essentially the 'E' in E-E-A-T), and Reddit threads are filled with real people giving unfiltered opinions. Whether it's which product someone actually bought or which tradie actually showed up on time, that's the signal these models are trained to value.
Google has clearly noticed this too, with studies like this one by Detailed.com finding that Reddit dominates the "Discussions and forums" SERP features. We see this in our own habits; millions of searches every month now include "reddit" as a modifier because people want real opinions instead of polished SEO-optimised fluff. By surfacing Reddit so prominently, Google is essentially following user behaviour.
Along with that, there’s the commercial angle: Google and OpenAI both have data licensing deals with Reddit, giving them direct access to content for AI training. This means that human-led Reddit content is literally baked into the training data and actively referenced in real-time answers.
What This Means for Your Brand
This isn't about becoming a Reddit marketing expert overnight. It's about recognising that the landscape has shifted and acting accordingly.
You need to start by knowing what's being said about you; search your brand name and product categories on Reddit, because those conversations are feeding directly into AI answers. If your competitors are being recommended and you're not, that’s exactly what the AI will tell your next customer.
You should also re-evaluate the kind of content you are publishing. Is it genuine, useful, and experience-based, or is your site full of polished marketing copy that doesn't say anything worth referencing? The brands currently being cited tend to produce content that reads more like helpful advice than advertising.
The Short Version
If you care about how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, you need to care about Reddit. Across almost every Australian B2C category, it has become a foundational cited source on Google AI
Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
With Reddit being the #1 most referenced source on ChatGPT in 7 out of 10 industries, we aren't looking at a niche signal, we’re seeing a structural shift in where your customers get their information.
The question for 2026 is whether your brand is part of those Reddit conversations or completely invisible in them.
Data sourced from Ahrefs Brand Radar. Analysis covers Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini across 10 Australian B2C verticals, February 2026.
James Richardson
Co-Founder
James is Co-Founder of Optimising and has been working in SEO for over 20 years, across everything from complex site migrations to multi-location franchise rollouts. These days he spends just as much time thinking about how brands show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity as he does about Google rankings. He started out running sports fan sites and early eCommerce stores before building the kind of SEO agency he actually wanted to work at.
Outside of work, he's usually being out-negotiated by his three daughters or supervising yet another cubby house build in the lounge room.
