Built a scraper over a few days, spent a few hundred dollars on API costs. Queried 1,300 keywords across 26 industries against Google and several AI search platforms.

  Google Search results:

  - Reddit in 83% of product-related queries
  - 62% of those in positions 1-3
  - Commercial intent queries ("best X", "X vs Y"): 93.6%

  AI Search was more interesting:

  - ChatGPT: ~20% Reddit citations
  - YouTube cited more often than Reddit
  - Perplexity: nearly zero

  That last one surprised me until I remembered Reddit sued Perplexity in October 2025. External research from Q2 2025 showed 47% Reddit citations on Perplexity. My data from January 2026 shows it's basically gone.

  My hypothesis on why Google is doing this:

  74% of new webpages now contain AI-generated content. Google seems to be responding by weighting sources that are harder to fake. Reddit has real users with post history. YouTube requires actual video production. Both are expensive to game at scale.

  This isn't necessarily good — Reddit has its own problems with astroturfing and mod capture. But the signal-to-noise ratio is apparently still better than the open web.

  Raw data and methodology - follow the link.

  Curious if others are seeing similar patterns, or if my methodology is flawed somewhere.