In the single week to 16 August, Reddit lost citations in all 10 industries we measured and lost share in all 10, while every other social network combined barely moved. Inside ChatGPT alone it gave up almost its entire footprint (a share drop of 88.9%).
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Two consecutive weekly snapshots, 9 and 16 August 2026. A single week, because that is where the movement is. Every number below is unpacked in the sections that follow.
The dates, the markets and the scale behind every number in this report.
This study compares two consecutive weekly snapshots, 9 and 16 August 2026, across roughly 425,000 measured prompts in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, in ten industries: consumer goods, health insurance, personal and business insurance, hospitality and resorts, banking, beauty and fragrance, veterinary diagnostics, industrial tools, business telephony, and shipping software.
Reddit citations fell in 10 of 10 industries and Reddit lost social citation share in 10 of 10, in a single week, while every other network combined moved 4%.
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Citations pooled by industry, 9 to 16 August. Unbranded questions only. Zero sits at the right edge, so every bar runs leftward. The bottom row is every other social network combined, counted in the same answers.
Pooled across all 189,000 social citations in the panel, Reddit fell 30.1% and every other social network combined fell 4.0%. Reddit fell more than seven times as far as the rest of social, in the same answers, in the same seven days.
The severity varies by a factor of six, from 13.1% in consumer goods to 80.7% in personal insurance. The direction does not vary at all. Reddit lost share of social citations in every industry, from 0.9 points in consumer goods to 36.6 points in personal insurance.
One industry can move for its own reasons. Ten industries across three markets, from consumer packaged goods to veterinary diagnostics to business telephony, moving the same way in the same week is a property of the engines.
Pooling engines together hides this. Filter to ChatGPT alone and Reddit gives up close to nine tenths of its citation share in one week.
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Relative change in Reddit's share of every citation ChatGPT returned, 9 to 16 August, per industry. Zero sits at the right edge.
In absolute terms, Reddit citations inside ChatGPT fell from 1,408 to 270 across these 3 industries in seven days, a drop of 80.8%. As a share of everything ChatGPT cited, Reddit went from 1.94% to 0.21%.
This is why the pooled figure in the previous section reads so much milder. Averaging ChatGPT together with Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini turns an 89% collapse in one engine into a 30% decline overall. The engines did not agree with each other, and the average describes none of them.
The two Google surfaces show nothing like this. Over the same week Google AI Mode moved 4.0% and Google AI Overview 6.7% in total citations, against a version-pinned reference that moved 3.3%. That is drift inside the measurement floor, not a break.
So this is one engine changing its source selection, not AI search as a whole reweighting away from Reddit. Anyone reading a single blended visibility number across engines would have seen a soft week and missed a structural change in the largest one.
One caution on size. A drop this steep in seven days is large enough that we will treat the exact magnitude as provisional until the next snapshot confirms the new level holds. The direction and the fact that it is confined to one engine are what we are confident about now.
LinkedIn, Instagram and Lemon8 gained. YouTube also lost ground, so this is not a handover to video. Reddit fell furthest by a wide margin.
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Change in citations from 9 to 16 August, pooled by industry. Blank cells are networks not cited in both snapshots for that industry, so no honest comparison exists.
| Network | Consumer goods | Health ins. | Hospitality | Banking | Beauty | Personal ins. | Shipping sw. | Telephony | Vet diagnostics | Industrial tools | All 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| −13.1% | −32.6% | −31.0% | −34.4% | −46.5% | −80.7% | −37.3% | −35.3% | −61.2% | −37.6% | −30.1% | |
| YouTube | −18.0% | −5.7% | −24.3% | −6.0% | +16.3% | +17.1% | −6.4% | +11.1% | −2.6% | −26.9% | −12.5% |
| −2.8% | +42.4% | −3.3% | +0.7% | +41.3% | +46.8% | +38.6% | −7.9% | +39.1% | −3.1% | +1.9% | |
| +27.4% | +29.3% | +47.4% | +83.3% | +194.1% | +29.6% | +6.6% | +33.7% | ||||
| +6.0% | +110.0% | −3.7% | +50.6% | +21.8% | −4.2% | +28.0% | +19.3% | +12.4% | |||
| TikTok | −8.0% | +1.0% | +19.9% | +16.7% | +3.6% | ||||||
| Quora | −18.7% | −14.5% | −0.0% | −17.3% | |||||||
| Lemon8 | +18.1% | +18.1% | |||||||||
| Yelp | −15.7% | −15.7% | |||||||||
| Medium | +30.0% | +30.0% |
Reddit is the only network in the table that fell in every industry, and it fell more than twice as far as the next-worst. YouTube is the largest source of social citations and it lost 12.5%, which rules out a migration from forums to video.
The gainers are the professional and visual networks. LinkedIn rose 33.7%, with its largest gains in business telephony and shipping software. Instagram rose 12.4%, including a doubling in health insurance. Facebook ended up 1.9% overall, with gains above 38% in four industries offsetting small declines elsewhere.
ChatGPT citations rose 64.5% in the week. Every other engine finished within 7% of where it started, which is close to what a frozen build did over the same days.
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Pooled across a 3-industry engine sub-panel, roughly 340,000 citations, 9 to 16 August, all source owners included. A per-engine breakdown is a heavier query than the network view, so it runs on fewer industries. The version-pinned engine is a frozen build that cannot respond to a vendor release, so it sets the scale for measurement drift.
The frozen build moved 3.3% over the week. Google AI Mode moved 4.0% and Google AI Overview 6.7%, so both sit close to the drift floor and neither is a movement we would report on its own. Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini all landed inside 2%.
ChatGPT is the exception, at nearly 20 times the drift floor. It gained citations in all 3 industries in the engine panel: 149.9% in health insurance, 13.0% in hospitality and 4.0% in consumer goods.
One caution on the largest figure. The 149.9% rise in health insurance follows a sharp contraction in that same engine three weeks earlier, so a large part of it is recovery rather than new ground. The other 2 industries rose from a stable base, which is the more useful signal.
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There is no single trend in how much AI engines cite. Health insurance grew by a third in a week while the other two industries were flat.
| Industry | Total citations | ChatGPT | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health insurance | +34.3% | +149.9% | −4.1% |
| Hospitality and resorts | 0.0% | +13.0% | −3.3% |
| Consumer goods | −0.6% | +4.0% | −4.7% |
Three conclusions that follow from the evidence above, and the honest limit of a one-week window.
ChatGPT rose 64.5% in a week while every other engine finished within 7% of where it started. A blended citation total averages that into something close to flat. The whole movement lives in one engine, and only a per-engine view shows it.
The Reddit number alone does not tell you what to do. Put it next to LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in the same reports and read the share. In 8 of the 10 industries the other networks held or grew while Reddit fell, so the slot moved and you can follow it. In consumer goods and industrial tools the whole category drifted down, and the answer sits outside social.
Reddit moved up to 36.6 points of social share in seven days, and its share of ChatGPT citations moved by almost 89%. Any plan built on a fixed assumption about where AI engines find their sources needs a review at weekly cadence, because the mix is moving faster than most content calendars.
Two consecutive snapshots establish that these movements happened in that week and that they are consistent across ten industries. They do not establish a trend line. We have already seen one citation contraction in this data recover fully inside three weeks, and the 149.9% engine rise here is partly that recovery. We also learned this week that widening the window to a fortnight hid the result rather than strengthening it. The next snapshot decides which of these is a step change and which is a swing.