Reddit didn't vanish. ChatGPT stopped treating threads like source material.

The independent tracker shows a real citation cliff. The 15% screenshot is a different cut. If models are reaching for docs and help centers, the GEO work is on your own pages.

I spent this morning on the Reddit-got-wiped-from-ChatGPT story because I replied to it before I'd done the homework. Here's what I can actually stand behind.

Promptwatch — Klaas Foppen's shop (Klaas @forgebitz), the same account that posted the original chart — tracked reddit.com's share of ChatGPT Search citations day by day. From July 18 through August 7 it sat at about 3.8%. On August 14 it fell under 1%. The August 14–17 average is about 0.5%. That's an 86% relative drop. They said it out loud: treat the size as provisional, a collection issue isn't ruled out. I'm using their numbers anyway because they're the only daily series I found, and they published the method.

Source: Promptwatch — Reddit citations daily series (3.8% → 0.5%, provisional; linked).

Same week, ChatGPT Search started scoping a lot of its background searches with the site: operator — see Promptwatch's site-operator fanouts. August 8: those queries jumped from about 0.4% of fanouts to about 17%. Fanouts per answer nearly doubled. ChatGPT is no longer just asking the open web and taking what comes back. It's going to specific domains on purpose.

The timing is not clean. The fanout change is August 8. Reddit's first slip is that day — high 3s to mid 2s. The cliff is August 14. Search Engine Journal already wrote that the fanout change alone does not explain the second drop. Gizmodo asked OpenAI and got no comment. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode show a slow fade, not a one-day wipe. So this looks ChatGPT-specific. I would not call it "AI search" as a whole.

Ira Bodnar's thread is the one that made the category story. Reddit 15% to 0. Review sites (G2, Capterra, that class) 7% to 0. Help centers and docs up to 32%. Small company pages cut in half. Established domains up. That's his GPT-5.1 vs GPT-5.6 Sol comparison — a model-version cut, not Promptwatch's date range. ExplainX republished the table and said they have not independently re-verified it. I haven't either. I'm not going to treat those percentages as a study. I am going to take the direction seriously, because it matches what the retrieval change would do: prefer a page that answers one question over a thread that buries the answer in replies.

If that holds, a lot of last year's GEO advice is pointed at the wrong surface.

Chasing Reddit threads as the strategy was always a little magical. Sometimes a thread got cited. Sometimes it didn't. Now ChatGPT can stop citing the whole domain in a week and your "we seeded the subreddit" plan is just a forum post. I wouldn't tell anyone to leave Reddit. People still read it. Google still cites it, just a little less. I would warn people that it is not a retrieval plan.

What I would actually do with a real SEO + GEO + site budget, if I had to spend it on the thing ChatGPT is now more willing to pull:

Write the pages that behave like a help center even if you are not software. One question, one page. How it works. Who it's for. What happens after they call. FAQs that are real answers, not keyword stuffing. Docs language. Not a blog that restates the homepage.

Make your own domain a place ChatGPT can search with site:you.com. That means the important pages are crawlable, indexed, and not trapped behind a tag soup or a PDF nobody linked. Thin category pages and broken internal search now cost you answers, not just rankings.

Get the entity straight. Same name, same address, same service list on the site, the listings, the about page. Schema that matches the page a human sees. This is boring. It's also the trust work. If the model is reaching for "established" domains, part of established is "we can tell who this is."

Reviews still matter for people and for Google. I wouldn't drop G2 or a Google Business Profile because one ChatGPT chart moved. I would stop treating a review-site profile as the thing that gets you cited in the assistant.

I wouldn't split this across three vendors. Site, SEO, GEO, listings, blogs, PR — that's one retrieval surface. Three shops means three different stories about the same business. New Reward is built as one partner for that pile. I'm not going to pretend a scan is a strategy. It is a free check of whether the systems can find you at all: newreward.com/scan.

Nobody can honestly promise ChatGPT will name you next week. The work is making it easier to pull your page when it goes looking. That's the job now.