We Ran 1,000 AI Shopping Searches. Here's How Often Reddit Decides the Answer

Perplexity Sonar cited Reddit in 44.7% of its sourced answers to shopping prompts, and made it the very first source in 23.5% of them. A GPT-4o mini setup connected to a web index that cannot crawl Reddit cited Reddit in exactly 0 of its 500 answers. Same prompts, same day, opposite results.

Those numbers come from our own study, the first proprietary dataset published on this blog. We generated 500 unique buying prompts across 20 product categories, sent each one to two AI engines, and counted every domain cited across the 1,000 resulting answers. Zero failed runs. Full methodology below, because the methodology is the point.

The takeaway is uncomfortable if you still treat Reddit as optional: on engines that can read Reddit, it shapes nearly half of shopping answers. On engines that can't, it doesn't exist. And the engines that can read it, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, are exactly the ones your buyers use.

How we built the study: 500 prompts, 2 engines, zero Reddit bias

We wanted commercial prompts, the kind people type right before spending money. So we generated 500 unique prompts from deterministic templates, spread across 20 product categories, 25 prompts per category:

• "best X for Y in 2026"
• "A vs B, which should I buy"
• "is X worth it"
• "best X alternatives"
• "best X under $N"
• plus recommendation and review-focused variants

No prompt mentions Reddit, forums, or communities. We didn't want to lead the witness.

Each prompt went to two engines, 1,000 runs total, 0 failures:

1. Perplexity Sonar: an AI answer engine with native web citations.
2. GPT-4o mini connected to a third-party web search index (Exa, accessed via OpenRouter).

One clarification, because it's the honest heart of this study: engine two is not ChatGPT. The ChatGPT product has a licensing agreement with Reddit. Our second setup uses the same model family wired to an independent index with no Reddit access. That isolates the one variable we care about: what happens to Reddit citations when the underlying index can't read Reddit.

We then parsed every answer and counted the domains cited as sources. Across 1,000 runs, 990 answers included at least one source, with 4.9 sources per answer on average.

The headline result: 44.7% with Reddit access, 0% without

Reddit appeared in 219 of Perplexity Sonar's 490 sourced answers, 44.7%. It was the first source listed in 115 of those answers, 23.5%. When Reddit was cited at all, it sat at position 2.26 in the source list on average, and it landed in the top 3 sources 175 times. Perplexity's answers averaged 5.9 citations each.

GPT-4o mini on the Exa index cited Reddit 0 times in 500 answers. All 500 runs returned citations, 3.9 sources per answer on average. Reddit never appeared. Not once, in any category, under any prompt template.

Same prompts, same day, same buying intent. With Reddit in the index: 219 citations at an average position of 2.26. Without Reddit in the index: zero. Access decided the outcome, not content quality.

Blended across both engines, Reddit still landed in 22.1% of all sourced answers, even though half the runs came from an engine structurally unable to cite it. Our Perplexity number is consistent with the third-party research we track in our Reddit AI search statistics hub, where Semrush found 40.1% of LLM citations point to Reddit, the #1 domain overall.

Reddit citation rate across 20 shopping categories

Reddit visibility is not uniform. On Perplexity Sonar, budgeting apps top the list at 56.5%, five more categories tie at 56.0%, and headphones bottom out at 24.0%. Here is the full breakdown:

The pattern is readable. Categories where trust is the entire purchase decision, budgeting apps, skincare, web hosting, VPNs, lean hardest on Reddit: nobody believes a hosting company's own landing page. Reddit's share shrinks where a dense professional review ecosystem exists. Headphones have rtings.com and soundguys.com, both visible in our domain data, so Perplexity spreads citations across dedicated testers.

But look at the floor, not just the ceiling. Even the weakest category still pulls Reddit into 24.0% of sourced answers. There is no shopping category in our dataset where Reddit is irrelevant.

Top cited domains: what each engine builds its answers from

Perplexity Sonar builds shopping answers primarily on user-generated content. Its most-cited domains across 490 sourced answers:

1. youtube.com, cited in 64.3% of answers
2. reddit.com, 44.7%
3. pcmag.com, 11.8%
4. cnet.com, 10.2%
5. techradar.com, 8.8%
6. forbes.com, 8.8%

Two UGC platforms first, everything else far behind. The gap between reddit.com at 44.7% and pcmag.com at 11.8% is the whole story of modern shopping research: real user experience outranks professional reviews by a factor of nearly four.

GPT-4o mini on the Exa index defaults to professional review media:

1. pcmag.com, 14.6%
2. nytimes.com, 10.2%
3. cnet.com, 9.4%
4. rtings.com, 6.8%
5. forbes.com, 5.2%
6. techradar.com, 4.8%

Respectable outlets, and notice what's missing: the entire layer of real user opinion. No Reddit anywhere, and YouTube doesn't even crack this engine's top 10. Strip the community sources out of an index and the answers become a digest of review sites, which is exactly what pre-2023 Google looked like.

Why one engine cited Reddit 219 times and the other exactly zero

Because since 2024, Reddit blocks crawlers that don't have a licensing agreement. Google signed one. OpenAI signed one. An independent web index like Exa has no such deal, so it cannot crawl Reddit's content. And a model cannot cite what its index never saw. That's the entire mechanism: 219 versus 0 is not a quality gap, it's an access gap.

This is also why we refuse to label engine two "ChatGPT". The real ChatGPT product reads Reddit through the OpenAI deal, so its citation behavior looks far closer to the Perplexity column than to the zero column. We broke down that relationship, the licensing deals and what they changed, in why ChatGPT cites Reddit so often.

Flip the logic and you get the strategic point: Reddit visibility is a gated asset. The gate is not something you can pay your way through with ads, because the citations point to threads, not to brands. The only way in is presence inside the conversations. And the engines behind the gate happen to be the largest AI surfaces in existence: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity.

What to do with this if you sell anything online

Your category almost certainly appears in the table above, or behaves like one that does. Three moves, in order:

1. Measure where you stand. Run your own category prompts through our free AI visibility checker and see whether AI engines mention your brand, and which sources they pull from instead.
2. Get into the threads. Our Reddit GEO guide covers the playbook: which subreddits matter for your category, what actually survives moderation, and how to contribute without getting banned.
3. Start where buyers already ask. The Reddit leads finder surfaces live threads where people are requesting recommendations in your exact category, this week.

That's the play we run at Readyt every day, and it's the play this study validates. You can't buy your way into AI shopping answers. You can only be present in the conversations they're built from.

One last thing: this is now a monthly series. We'll re-run the identical 500 prompts through the identical two engines every month and publish the deltas: which categories move, whether Perplexity's 44.7% holds, and whether any new domain breaks the top 5. The first follow-up lands in about 30 days.

FAQ

Paul-Marie Hamon

Founder @ Readyt

Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.