Ahrefs: ChatGPT Citations of Reddit Drop 88% in Six Months

An article posted on DEV Community on October 30, 2026 cites citation tracking data that Ahrefs published on October 12, 2026. According to that data, the share of ChatGPT answers referencing Reddit fell by 88% over the six months from March to September 2026. The figures come from Ahrefs' Brand Radar product, which tracked between 2.4 million and 3.8 million answers from US users each month. Drawing on this, the author argues that the advice found in GEO guides published over the past 18 months, namely to get mentioned on Reddit because LLMs pull from it, is now outdated for ChatGPT: that recommendation was still sound in early 2025, but ChatGPT's retrieval is shifting toward first-party sources such as brand websites and pricing pages. The article notes that the data backing this claim has been publicly available since October 12, 2026. As of the time of writing, the piece does not report any response from OpenAI or from Reddit, and there is no independent verification of the tracking numbers, so the discussion remains at the level of a single vendor data release plus one author's interpretation, with no further developments.