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ChatGPT is citing Reddit 88% less and Wikipedia 80% less than it was six months ago.

Marketing2 min readSam Page

When it needs to check a fact, it’s increasingly going to your website instead.

Ahrefs has just analysed 15 million “fan-out” queries from ChatGPT, the behind-the-scenes searches it runs to research and check an answer. When the model searched specific sites to verify something, around three-quarters of the most-searched were brand sites.

Your website is increasingly becoming the place your facts get checked, as well as the place people convert.

There’s an uncomfortable bit too.

84% of factual prompts cited an official source, against 68% of comparison prompts.

You get cited when a buyer asks whether something is true, and much less when they ask which option is better.

In my opinion, the answer is the material considered-purchase brands are often reluctant to publish. Hiding it behind a form or a sales call costs you twice, once with the buyer and again with the model.

A few practical things I’d look at:

  • Find out which questions your buyers actually ask AI about your category, and whether you’re cited when they do. If not, see who is.

  • Publish the facts openly. Specifications, pricing or price ranges, eligibility, availability and how you work. If a buyer would ask it, answer it on your site.

  • Make those facts easy to check. Clear pages, named people, dates, methodology and structured data so the model can trust what it finds.

  • Take comparison questions seriously. Explain who you’re right for, who you’re not, and how you differ. Honest comparison content is where most brands are missing.

  • Look again at what you gate. If something builds confidence, the cost of hiding it is probably higher than the lead it captures.

  • Measure citations, not just traffic. Track visibility at prompt level and connect it to pipeline, so it’s treated as a commercial issue rather than an SEO one.

We saw this with a client recently, where structured data helped grow their monthly AI audience by 53%.

Your website actually matters more now than ever before.

Source: Ahrefs, “How ChatGPT Does Query Fan-Out (15 Million Queries Studied)”.

First published on LinkedIn.

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title: "ChatGPT is citing Reddit 88% less and Wikipedia 80% less than it was six months ago."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/chatgpt-is-citing-reddit-88-less-and-wikipedia-80-less-than-it-was-six-months-ag
date: 2026-10-15
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Marketing, Sales]
reading_time: 2 min
summary: "When it needs to check a fact, it’s increasingly going to your website instead."
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7516409697873108992
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# ChatGPT is citing Reddit 88% less and Wikipedia 80% less than it was six months ago.

When it needs to check a fact, it’s increasingly going to your website instead.

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/chatgpt-is-citing-reddit-88-less-and-wikipedia-80-less-than-it-was-six-li1.webp)

Ahrefs has just analysed 15 million “fan-out” queries from ChatGPT, the behind-the-scenes searches it runs to research and check an answer. When the model searched specific sites to verify something, around three-quarters of the most-searched were brand sites.

Your website is increasingly becoming the place your facts get checked, as well as the place people convert.

There’s an uncomfortable bit too.

84% of factual prompts cited an official source, against 68% of comparison prompts.

You get cited when a buyer asks whether something is true, and much less when they ask which option is better.

In my opinion, the answer is the material considered-purchase brands are often reluctant to publish. Hiding it behind a form or a sales call costs you twice, once with the buyer and again with the model.

A few practical things I’d look at:

- Find out which questions your buyers actually ask AI about your category, and whether you’re cited when they do. If not, see who is.

- Publish the facts openly. Specifications, pricing or price ranges, eligibility, availability and how you work. If a buyer would ask it, answer it on your site.

- Make those facts easy to check. Clear pages, named people, dates, methodology and structured data so the model can trust what it finds.

- Take comparison questions seriously. Explain who you’re right for, who you’re not, and how you differ. Honest comparison content is where most brands are missing.

- Look again at what you gate. If something builds confidence, the cost of hiding it is probably higher than the lead it captures.

- Measure citations, not just traffic. Track visibility at prompt level and connect it to pipeline, so it’s treated as a commercial issue rather than an SEO one.

We saw this with a client recently, where structured data helped grow their monthly AI audience by 53%.

Your website actually matters more now than ever before.

Source: Ahrefs, “How ChatGPT Does Query Fan-Out (15 Million Queries Studied)”.