We Counted 8 Weeks of AI Citations. Reddit and LinkedIn Won.

By Mark Buraga, Independent SEO Consultant at Growth Engine PH

Last updated: 28 August 2026

One published analysis makes Reddit the most-cited domain in AI answers. Another, measured months later, puts Reddit at 1.01 percent of all AI citations. Both were run by competent teams. That gap is the problem with the question, and it is why we stopped asking it and counted our own instead.

For eight weeks we ran the same ten buying questions through Google AI Mode and recorded every source domain it returned. Reddit appeared 34 times, on 8 of the 10 questions. LinkedIn appeared 24 times, also on 8 of 10. 568 distinct domains showed up in total. If you want to know where AI answers get sources, this is one honest way to find out: a count with a stated method, scope and expiry, that you can run on your own ten questions by Friday.

Why do published figures for Reddit AI citations disagree so wildly?

Published estimates of Reddit’s share of AI citations range from most-cited domain overall to 1.01 percent of all citations, because each study measures a different prompt population and none of them measures yours.

Three good studies, three incompatible readings. Peec AI analyzed 30 million sources across five AI platforms and ranked Reddit the single most-cited domain, ahead of YouTube and LinkedIn (31 March 2026, via Search Engine Land). Conductor analyzed 238,212 prompts and found Reddit’s citation share fell from 2.02 percent in October 2025 to 1.01 percent by January 2026 (updated 8 July 2026). Semrush snapshotted 230,000 prompts over 13 weeks and found ChatGPT cited Reddit in close to 60 percent of responses in early August 2025 before collapsing to around 10 percent by mid-September, while Reddit held far steadier on Google AI Mode (10 November 2025).

None of those is wrong. They sampled different prompts on different engines in different months, and the prompt population is the variable nobody controls for. Yours is the only population you sell into. Same lesson as the rank-citation decoupling: the aggregate stopped predicting your page.

How we measured Reddit AI citations across ten buying questions

We ran a fixed set of fifteen prompts against Google AI Mode weekly for eight weeks in one geography, recorded every source domain returned, and counted only the ten a buyer would actually type before hiring anyone.

Eight captures: 13 and 29 June, 6, 13, 20 and 27 July, 3 and 10 August 2026. One engine, Google AI Mode. One geography, the Philippines. The prompt set was locked at baseline and never edited mid-run: a moving prompt set produces a moving number. Five of the fifteen prompts name Growth Engine PH and are excluded from every figure below, because a brand query returns your own site by construction. The ten that remain:

1. Best SEO consultant for law firms
2. How do I get my website cited by AI search engines?
3. GEO services for accounting firms
4. SEO consultant in the Philippines for international clients
5. How much should a small law firm pay for SEO?
6. Who are the best GEO (generative engine optimization) consultants?
7. Top AI SEO agencies for professional services firms
8. Growth Engine PH alternatives
9. Best SEO consultants in Southeast Asia
10. AI search optimization specialists for boutique firms

Two conventions. A domain counts once per prompt per week, not once per link, so 34 means 34 prompt-weeks. Domains are raw hosts, so ph.linkedin.com and linkedin.com are separate rows. The full procedure is in how to test.

What we deliberately did not measure

We did not measure click-through, sentiment, revenue, or any engine other than Google AI Mode, because the capture method cannot support those claims honestly. Nothing here describes ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any market other than the one we ran in. If a sentence below reads like a universal law, it is written badly.

Which domains actually supplied the sources?

Across eight weeks and ten buying questions, reddit.com appeared 34 times on 8 of the 10 prompts and in 8 of 8 weekly captures, and linkedin.com 24 times on 8 of 10 prompts in 7 of 8 captures, well ahead of every SEO provider in the market.

Growth Engine PH own capture corpus: 8 weekly audits, 13 June to 10 August 2026, Google AI Mode, geo PH.

I aggregated those eight weeks on 13 August with one question in mind: which competitor was beating me in the answer layer. The obvious rivals were all in the file, and I expected one of them at the top. The top was reddit.com, with the highest-placed SEO provider 14 appearances behind it. Two rows down was the line I did not want: cited on 39 of 40 questions that name us, and 5 of 80 that would have won us a client. I had spent eight weeks measuring a competitive field and found there was barely one to measure.

Two footnotes. Folding ph.linkedin.com into linkedin.com would make LinkedIn 25 appearances on 9 of 10 prompts; we report raw hosts and show the working. And the absences: zero YouTube, zero Wikipedia, zero Quora, across all eight captures on all ten questions, in a market where the 30-million-source global ranking puts YouTube second and Wikipedia fourth.

Why do Reddit and LinkedIn supply so many AI citations here?

Because an answer engine weights independent corroboration over self-assertion, which is a settled mechanism we have written up separately and are not going to re-litigate here.

Many unrelated people describing the same thing reads as evidence; your own page describing itself reads as a claim about itself. That is the whole of it. The full argument, including why your homepage structurally cannot supply the second kind of signal, is in mention mechanics, and that is the better place to read it.

That explains why. It does not tell you how much, in which market, or whether the surfaces leading globally are the ones leading in your own buying questions. That gap is what this count fills.

What does the long tail say that the top of the list does not?

568 distinct domains appeared across those ten questions and 71.3 percent of them appeared exactly once, which means the answer layer is not consulting a stable shortlist of authorities.

The ten questions produced 1,016 domain appearances over eight weeks. 405 of the 568 domains showed up once and were never seen again, and only 34 appeared five or more times. Reddit’s 34, the highest count in the corpus, are 3.3 percent of the total.

The volume underneath was just as unstable. Across the seven captures that share one instrument, total sources returned on those ten questions ran 43, 136, 51, 92, 104, 212 and 216. Same prompts, same engine, same wording, roughly a fivefold swing. Our first capture returned 253 on the same questions, but it ran on a different capture setup, so we leave it out of any volume comparison and use it only for which domains appeared.

So “get on the list” is the wrong goal, because there is no list. There is a churn of one-time sources around a small stable core, which means a monthly reading takes one sample from a very wide distribution and reports it as a level.

Is Reddit’s position in AI citations permanent?

No, and our own numbers say so: reddit.com’s share of all domain appearances fell from 9.0 percent in week one to 2.7 percent in week eight, even as its presence held at eight weeks out of eight.

Report the number that weakens your headline first. Reddit appeared on 7 of the 10 questions in the 13 June capture and on between 2 and 5 in every capture since. Eight data points is not a trend and we will not call it one, but the direction matches Conductor’s finding of a 50 percent share decline over four months across 238,212 prompts.

Then there is the strongest objection to this entire post, and it comes from Reddit. The most-cited domain in our count is a public company whose chief executive is openly unconvinced the arrangement pays him. On the 30 July 2026 earnings call, Steve Huffman said the “10 blue links have driven a tremendous amount of value for the whole ecosystem, and AI Overviews has yet to make a similar level of positive impact,” and that Reddit was “still just looking for that … win-win” with Google (CNBC, 30 July 2026). Reddit’s stock fell 11 percent in extended trading that day despite beating estimates. Add the practitioner caveat that AI bots increasingly flood Reddit while human participation migrates elsewhere (NP Digital, “The New Search Funnel” webinar, August 2026), and the corroboration signal that makes Reddit valuable is itself under pressure.

That objection is correct, and it does not change what the answer layer cited this quarter. It changes the shelf life. If the supplier of your citations is unhappy with the terms, the terms will move, and a static recommendation will not tell you when. A repeatable count will.

What do you do when the deciding surfaces are not yours to edit?

You measure them on a fixed cadence instead of optimizing against a global average, because the only allocation input that survives contact with your own market is the one you generated from it.

Write your ten buying questions. Not brand questions, which will flatter you the way ours flattered us at 39 of 40, but the ones a buyer types before hiring anyone in your category. Run them weekly against the engine your buyers use and record source domains, not impressions. Then read the absences as hard as the winners: our zero-YouTube result means a global average would have sent real money to a surface absent from every answer our buyers see. For the page-level half, start with citation architecture and the GEO diagnostic.

This weekly capture is a standard deliverable on Engine and Engine Pro, tracked per client per week, and we run it on ourselves first. That is how we know our own buying-intent number is 5 of 80. If you would rather this ran on your ten questions weekly than on your own spreadsheet, let’s talk.

The two-hour version

A firm with no tooling budget can produce its own version of this count in about two hours a week, using nothing but the search engine its buyers already use. Six steps.

1. Write ten buying questions. Exclude anything containing your brand name.
2. Run all ten in Google AI Mode, in your buyers’ country, in one sitting.
3. Screenshot each answer and list every source domain it shows.
4. Record one row per domain per question per week. Do not deduplicate across weeks.
5. Repeat on the same weekday. Four weeks gives you a frequency table and a volatility read.
6. Read the top ten and the zeros with equal attention.

Nobody can tell you what share of AI citations Reddit gets. Anybody can tell you what their own ten buying questions returned last week. Ours returned two platforms we cannot edit, a long tail we cannot predict, and one number about ourselves we would rather not have published. The next firm to run it will find something else, and that is the point.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your page ranks top 5 but isn’t cited in the AI answer. What do you check first? Check what the answer actually cited before you check your page. In our own eight-week count, 8 of the 10 buying questions returned Reddit and 8 returned LinkedIn, so the slot you are competing for often was not a publisher slot at all. Establish the source composition first, then diagnose retrievability with citation architecture. Question observed in r/content_marketing, 10 August 2026.

What does each AI engine want before it cites you? Our corpus covers one engine, Google AI Mode, so we will not generalize across engines. What it shows is that inside a single engine the source composition is unstable week to week: total sources returned on ten identical questions swung from 43 to 216 across seven captures on one instrument. Any answer describing a fixed set of engine preferences is describing a snapshot. Question observed in r/aeo, 11 August 2026.

What happens after you get cited? Often nothing, and Reddit is the best evidence of that. It is the most-cited domain in our count, and its chief executive told the 30 July 2026 earnings call that AI Overviews “has yet to make a similar level of positive impact” compared to the ten blue links (CNBC). Citation volume and commercial return are separate measurements. Question raised in r/B2bGotomarket, 10 August 2026.

What share of AI citations comes from Reddit in my market? Nobody can tell you without measuring your market. Published global figures range from most-cited domain overall (Peec AI, 30 million sources, 31 March 2026) to 1.01 percent of all citations (Conductor, 238,212 prompts, 8 July 2026), depending on the prompt population sampled. In our own ten buying questions over eight weeks in Google AI Mode, reddit.com supplied 34 of 1,016 domain appearances, about 3.3 percent. That is scoped to that market, engine and window; why Reddit carries weight anywhere is covered in mention mechanics.

How often should I re-run a citation count? Weekly, if the number is going to inform a decision. Across eight identical weekly captures the total sources returned swung roughly fivefold, so a monthly sample takes one reading from a distribution that wide and reports it as a level. Four weeks separates a signal from a swing.

Should I invest in YouTube for AI citations? Global studies rank YouTube second or third among cited domains. Our corpus returned zero YouTube appearances across all eight captures on all ten buying questions. We are not saying YouTube does not work. We are saying it has not appeared in the answers our buyers see, which is worth knowing before paying for it.