We analyzed 30 million AI search citations. Reddit ranked #1. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews - it was either #1 or #2 on every single platform. Love it or hate it - Reddit is already shaping what AI says about your industry. Every thread, comment, and discussion is a potential cited source. But Reddit is just one step. One that surprised me? Yelp. It consistently shows up as a top AI source 0 not just for restaurants, but across local and service businesses. Most brands aren't thinking about it at all. The bigger lesson: AI visibility is not just about your website. It's about where your brand lives across the web - and AI is pulling from more places than most people realize. The brands winning at AI search are showing up across multiple platforms. Not just one. Full research + actionable recommendations in the comments.
I've been using Peec for a while, running many pitch projects in different categories. Although these are the most important domains, the behavior varies widely across categories. Besides, when you analyze the sources by domain category rather than by individual domains, the picture is very different. In some categories like tech (ecomm platforms) the brand.com sites are even more important than UGC platforms. It'd be nice to have a deeper analysis by product categories and domain categories :)
Tomek Rudzki Really interesting study! I’d love to know how citation weight is distributed across subreddits. Is it a long tail of thousands of niche communities each contributing a little, or more like a handful of high-trust subreddits (r/personalfinance, r/explainlikeimfive, r/askscience) doing some heavy lifting?
Reddit is a real gold mine for honest customer feedback.
First of all really appreciate the work that went into pulling 30M sources that's not a small lift. People asking real questions, getting real messy answers. Way harder to fake than a polished brand blog. Kinda makes me rethink how much time companies spend perfecting their website copy when they should probably just be... actually participating on Redditttt
It’s wild - these AI "search engines" are basically where Google was 15 years ago, back when a single directory listing could make or break your visibility. I wonder if they’ll ever actually catch up to Google when it comes to filtering out all the noise and spam.
Can we start saying for which industry this was run? This is not at all true for all industry :)
Is there some important information missing, or did I overlook it? Which market does the study analyze? US? Worldwide? Germany? 😉
Why is GPT such an outlier?
Top cited source is brand's own website.
Full research -> https://peec.ai/blog/top-domains-cited-by-ai-search-analysis-based-on-30m-sources