We collected 608 AI answers to buyer questions in one category over three months and counted where the models got their information. Reddit came first by a distance we did not expect.
| Domain | Answers citing it |
|---|---|
| reddit.com | 225 |
| aeoagency.org | 148 |
| youtube.com | 145 |
| linkedin.com | 134 |
| aeoengine.ai | 130 |
| thatware.co | 125 |
| techradar.com | 83 |
| en.wikipedia.org | 38 |
| quora.com | 30 |
Reddit is cited 52% more often than the next domain and nearly six times more often than Wikipedia. It beats every vendor website in the category, including the sites of the agencies that get named most.
Not the reason people assume
The obvious reading is that Google signed a deal with Reddit, so Reddit wins. That explains some of Google's behavior and none of ChatGPT's or Perplexity's, and Reddit leads across all five engines rather than only the Google ones.
The better explanation is duller. Retrieval systems look for passages that answer a question in the language the question was asked.
A vendor page answers the question the vendor wishes had been asked, in the vendor's vocabulary. A Reddit thread is dozens of people describing a real problem in ordinary words, arguing about it, correcting each other, with the useful answer usually voted to the top.
That is close to an ideal shape for retrieval. Not because Reddit is authoritative, but because it is dense with the exact phrasing of the problem and comes with a built-in signal about which answer other people found useful.
The same logic explains YouTube at 145 and LinkedIn at 134. Both are places where people describe problems in their own words at volume. Neither is where most B2B content budgets go.
What this does not mean
It does not mean go and post links to your site on Reddit. That gets removed, earns nothing, and is the fastest way to make the whole approach fail. The threads being cited are ones where somebody answered a question properly and the community agreed.
It also does not mean your own site stops mattering. Somebody has to be named in the answer and the model needs a reason to believe the named business is real.
What it means is that the sources deciding who gets named are increasingly not owned by the businesses being named. That is a different content strategy from the one most teams are running.
The uncomfortable version
For roughly fifteen years the plan has been: publish on your own domain, accumulate authority, rank, get the click. AI search breaks a link in that chain. The model reads a set of sources, most of which you do not control, and then decides who to recommend. Your pages influence that. They do not decide it.
In the same dataset, the most-named brand was cited as a source 59 times while being named 147 times. It was being named inside other people's material. The brand with the highest ratio of read-to-named, which was us, was being read constantly and recommended almost never.
What we would actually do
Find where your buyers argue. Every category has a Reddit equivalent. Sometimes it is Reddit, sometimes a forum, a Discord, a subreddit with 4,000 members, or a professional association's list. Find the one where your buyers describe your problem to each other.
Answer questions there properly, as yourself. Not as a campaign. Moderators in the useful communities are extremely good at detecting the alternative, and a removed comment is worth less than no comment.
Get into other people's articles. Round-ups, comparisons, industry lists. These are what the model reads when it builds a shortlist.
Then fix your own pages, so that when a model checks whether you are real, the answer is obviously yes.
Method and its limits
39 buyer questions, five answer engines, 608 answers collected on a rolling schedule between 24 May and 24 August 2026. A domain is counted once per answer that cites it, so a heavily footnoted answer cannot inflate a single source.
The category measured is marketing and AI search agencies, which is our own. That makes it the category we understand best and also the one where we have an interest, and it is worth saying so.
Whether Reddit dominates this hard everywhere is genuinely open. We would expect the effect to be strongest where buyers discuss purchases publicly and weakest where they do not. If you run the same measurement in another category, we would like to see it.
What to do with this without ruining it
The obvious reading is that everyone should go and post on Reddit. That reading is how a useful channel gets destroyed, and it does not work anyway, because the mechanism depends on the thing being genuine.
What does not work. Posting links. Creating accounts to recommend yourself. Paying someone to do either. All three get removed, and removed content is not cited. Reddit's moderation is unusually good at this and the models are reading the surviving threads, not the deleted ones.
What does work. Answering questions in your actual area of expertise, in threads where the question is real, without linking anywhere. That is it. The citation value comes from your business being named in a useful answer by someone with a history of useful answers, and that cannot be shortcut.
Why it is worth the awkwardness. A single thread that stays up and gets voted useful can be read by a model for years. Compare that to a blog post, which needs to compete against every other blog post on the topic.
The realistic version for a busy business. One person, thirty minutes a week, in the two or three subreddits where your buyers actually are. Not a campaign. A habit. And the same logic applies to the other two community sources in the table above, which most businesses ignore entirely.
The rest of the picture
The figures above are why the research on this page exists. We run this measurement continuously across every account rather than sampling it, which is the only way to reach a number like 82,000 measured answers and the only way to see a change in the week it happens rather than the month after.
What this looks like when someone does it properly
A specialist consultant who committed thirty minutes a week for six months.
What they did not do. Post links. Announce their company. Answer questions outside their expertise. Create a second account.
What they did. Answered questions in two subreddits where their actual specialism came up, in full, with the reasoning, and without mentioning their business unless someone asked what they did.
The awkward part. For the first two months this felt like unpaid work with no return, because it was. Three answers were downvoted. One was removed for being too long.
What changed at around month three. Answers started getting referenced by other users. Two threads they had contributed to began appearing as citations under AI answers to questions in their category. Their name was in those threads.
Where it landed at month six. Named in answers to two questions they had never targeted with any content at all, because the citation was a thread rather than a page.
The economics. Thirteen hours across six months. Compare that to the cost of ranking a page against every other page on the same topic.
Why it cannot be outsourced. The value came from the answers being genuinely good, by someone who genuinely knew. That is not a task you can brief.
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Ashur Homa
Built and scaled a digital brand to $100M+ in sales with zero ad spend. Has helped businesses generate millions through AI go-to-market strategy. Leads growth at Omni Eclipse.
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