• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

OpenAI continues to experiment with presenting the most critical information and sources first, as the company weighs the impact of citation on publishers and websites. It’s a shift toward sites that provide answers to queries.

The number of long-tail results continues to shrink as a result. The decline in referral rates began as citation patterns changed.

Branded websites are not doing well either. These sites have lost visibility and millions of potential referrals and clicks, according to recent data. Millions of potential referrals are being absorbed by several dominant platforms.

“Reddit and Wikipedia aren't winning because they're special,” Josh Blyska, strategy and research at Profound, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “They're winning by default because they're the only ones providing direct answers.”

When someone asks "what is the best CRM for startups?," typically the answer a brand page returns is “Schedule a demo," while Reddit has a thread comparing 10 options. This is why Reddit gets cited in ChatGPT.

Referral traffic from ChatGPT to websites fell 52% since July 21, according to Blyska.

Blyska analyzed more than 1 billion ChatGPT citations and 1 million referral visits from a sample of sites across verticals and found that Reddit citations rose 87% since July 23, topping 10% of all ChatGPT citations.

Wikipedia jumped 62%, taking nearly 13% of citation share. The top three sites--Wikipedia, Reddit and TechRadar--accounted for 22% of all citations, up 53% in one month. It’s not a result of the latest model. This shift has been building over time.

These modifications demonstrate how AI companies can dramatically change traffic patterns by adjusting algorithmic weights. The changes occurred weeks before GPT-5's release, ruling out that the new model's capabilities drove the change in traffic pattern shifts.

The research suggests this is another area where brands must adapt to compete effectively within AI citation systems. 

This test is just OpenAI experimenting with how citation weigh in query results. Blyska explained that Reddit and Wikipedia spikes in just one month aren’t organic.

“This is what happens when you turn the dials on a retrieval augmented generation system to let high-utility answers get prioritized over branded content,” Blyska wrote.