Answering the Call: How Reddit and Wikipedia Are Dominating ChatGPT's Search Citations

As ChatGPT gains ground on Google and its decades of search dominance, tripling its searches from February to August while watching Google’s share drop from 73% to 67%, one recent report says ChatGPT’s referral traffic is down by more than 50% from earlier in the summer. 

“I pulled from our dataset of 1+ billion ChatGPT citations and 1+ million referral visits from ChatGPT to figure out what’s going on,” writes Profound’s Josh Blyskal on LinkedIn. “ChatGPT is shifting towards sites that provide ‘answers’, and the long tail of citations is shrinking as a result.”

Blyskal’s research last month found that 1 in 5 ChatGPT citations is going to either Reddit, Wikipedia, or TechRadar, with Reddit’s citations increasing by 87% from July 23rd and Wikipedia’s up 62%.

(Source: Profound’s Josh Blyskal, LinkedIn)

“At the same time, branded websites are seeing fewer citation opportunities: millions of potential referrals are being absorbed by these dominant platforms,” Blyskal writes, noting that this can’t be attributed to the change to GPT-5 since the “consolidation started weeks before the model shipped.”

Blyskal reasons that Reddit and Wikipedia are succeeding because they provide direct answers to questions, while so many company landing pages instead push for actions like scheduling a demo. (Or, as Christope Jammet wrote on MediaPost about what makes Reddit’s upvote-based communities different, they “detect branded nonsense like a shark smells blood.”)

What Can Publishers and Brands Do To Improve Traffic On ChatGPT?

So if the question is what can publishers do to appear more in ChatGPT’s search results, the answer might be right there in asking (and answering) more questions your audience may have.

“Brands are being pushed by [OpenAI] to become the answer on their own site: Create comparison guides, answer real questions, publish what your customers actually search for, in the language they use,” Blyskal writes. “The citation opportunity is massive for brands willing to shift from conversion first to answer first content.”