Reddit Nearly Vanishes From ChatGPT Citations After OpenAI Search Change

Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations collapsed from 3.8% to 0.5% in days, after OpenAI changed how ChatGPT searches the web — and the timing could hardly be stranger.

Is ChatGPT leaving Reddit on read?

Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations has plummeted to just 0.5% of responses, according to a Gizmodo report based on data from AI visibility platform PromptWatch. The drop was sudden. Reddit held a steady 3.8% average share of ChatGPT citations from July 18 through August 7 — one of the largest of any domain on the web. By August 14, it had fallen below 1%, and the August 14–17 average of 0.52% represents an 86% relative decline.

For context on how far that is from Reddit's peak: as recently as April, Reddit was the single most-cited domain in ChatGPT Search, accounting for 4.14% of all citations.

What Changed On August 8

The slide traces back to a technical shift in how ChatGPT searches the web. On August 8, PromptWatch observed that ChatGPT Search began using the "site:" operator at scale — queries scoped to a specific domain jumped from 0.37% to 16.8% of all background searches within a single day, a roughly 46x increase. At the same time, the average number of searches ChatGPT runs per response nearly doubled, from about 1.08 to 1.83.