An Ahrefs analysis of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts found that pages from a dedicated Reddit source were rarely cited in ChatGPT replies, although they were often picked up.
Ahrefs highlights this pattern in a new report.
What the report looked at
Ahrefs examined 1.4 million ChatGPT 5.2 prompts, tracking which pages were retrieved and then cited in the final response. About half of the retrieved pages were cited overall.
The citation rate varied by source, with pages from general web searches cited most frequently. In contrast, pages from a Reddit source, described by Ahrefs, were cited only 1.93% of the time. This highlights Reddit’s shortcoming: while the Reddit source was often retrieved, it rarely appeared as a visible quote.
Discovering Reddit
Of all the pages retrieved but not cited in Ahrefs’ dataset, 67.8% came from the specific Reddit source identified by Ahrefs.
Ahrefs writes that ChatGPT “extensively uses Reddit to understand topics, gauge consensus, and create context, but it almost never gives Reddit credit.”
One point to clarify is that Reddit pages can still be cited by ChatGPT when they appear in standard web search results. The 1.93% figure refers to what Ahrefs calls a separate Reddit source, separate from general web searches. In May 2024, OpenAI and Reddit announced data partnership grant OpenAI access to Reddit data.
What helps a page get cited
Ahrefs looked at how well page titles and URLs aligned with specific sub-questions generated by ChatGPT during the search process. To do this, Ahrefs used open source tools to calculate similarity scores, approximating ChatGPT’s internal matching process. Pages with higher scores to match these subquestions were cited more frequently in the dataset.
When ChatGPT Search responds to a prompt, it often happens breaks the prompt breaks down into several narrower queries and searches for pages linked to each. In Ahrefs’ data, titles and URLs matching these narrower queries had a stronger correlation with citations than pages that only broadly matched the original prompt. URL structure also played a role. Pages with clear, descriptive URLs were cited approximately 89.78% of the time they appeared in search results, compared to 81.11% for pages with less descriptive URLs. This corresponds to SE Ranking Analysiswhich found that ChatGPT tends to favor URLs describing broader topics rather than those focused on a single keyword.
Why it matters
Data from Ahrefs indicates that Reddit’s impact on answer development differs from what businesses might expect. It seems Reddit can shape responses indirectly without being explicitly cited. This type of influence is still important, but it is more of an upstream effect than a direct acknowledgment of the quote.
For clear citation credit, data from Ahrefs shows that the best indicator is whether your page titles and URLs match the specific subqueries produced by ChatGPT Search from a prompt. It’s not enough to simply match the broad keyword.
Looking to the future
The study evaluates ChatGPT 5.2 on desktop in February 2025. Since then, OpenAI has released several model updates, such as the GPT-5.3 instant transition, which Résonéo links to a 20% decrease in the number of domains cited per ChatGPT response. It is unclear whether the Reddit gap and headline matching patterns observed by Ahrefs still apply to these newer patterns.
Featured Image: Koshiro K./Shutterstock
