• by Kevin Ryan , over 1 hour ago

In July I wrote about the industry's love affair with visibility-based metrics. You can connect the data, but you still have to earn the authority. A few weeks later, the market ran the experiment.

In the undying quest to make this sound like the least sloppy version of what's transpired, I humbly offer you the following, a newer, smarter version of what some have been saying for the better part of a quarter century.

Between Aug. 8 and Aug. 17, multiple independent trackers measured the same event from different angles.

Promptwatch was first. It had Reddit averaging 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through Aug. 7. And then on Aug. 14 the share dropped below 1%. The four-day average from Aug. 14 to 17 came in at 0.52%, an 86.4% relative decline.

Otterly counted daily citations across 16 brand reports and found a drop of at least 73%.

PromptScout ran its own read of the same window.

The samples and methods were all different, which is sort of my point.

The story almost nobody covered is the one Suganthan spelled out in his teardown: what the model consults is not the same as what it shows you.

Reddit's share of the pages ChatGPT actually retrieved during those weeks looked nothing like its share of the pages it credited.

Suganthan's own captures had brand mentions running at 68.9% versus 2.1% in the displayed layer. 

Aman Holdings' OpenLens read told a parallel story on the citation side: Reddit went from roughly 1 in 35 responses to 1 in 1,000 across 219 of 227 prompts spanning 24 client projects.

Two different measurement approaches, same underlying picture.

ChatGPT stopped talking about Reddit but was still reading it. Most of the commentary I saw treated those as the same thing. They are not.

On Google's side there was no cliff. Reddit's share of AI Overview citations drifted from about 2.37% to 2.10%, an 11% relative decline. And Google AI Mode slid from 2.22% to 1.54%, closer to 30%.

The lead that got buried was the AI Overviews expansion. AI Mode is no longer even a choice.

By the way, if you want a window into the madness that will surely be the next few years in the discovery world, go ahead and smash that "Ask anything" button a few times.

My feed responded with panic and recipe, sold at the same time, by the same ecosystem.

The panic: a viral post claiming Google cut URLs per response in half, with nothing the number traces back to.

The recipe: a promoted ad campaign selling listicles, bullet points, and that trick where you jam the year into the title.

I've already written about the tells and about platforms debasing their own signal, so I'll just note the timing and move on.

The denominator changing is the most useful way I've found to think about all of it.

When an engine reduces how many sources it displays, raw citation counts fall for everyone, including brands whose actual visibility didn't change.

When that same engine reads Reddit heavily while crediting it almost never, a whole category of "visibility" turns out to be an accounting artifact. You were being read the whole time and calling it being seen.

Which brings me to how I'd manage this: Stop treating SEO and AI visibility as two separate scoreboards, and stop treating either one as a series of short-term hits. Manage discovery as one portfolio.

I know portfolio thinking isn't new, but I don't think many companies are actually there yet.

In a nutshell, if Reddit was your whole strategy, you had a terrible month. If it was one position among several, you had a rebalancing event.

Otterly's brand-level read backs this up: the aggregate moved a lot less than the headline did.

What held up in August were the boring positions.

Brand sites getting credited more often in place of forums, per Suganthan's teardowns and the OpenLens read. Being the authoritative source for your own category.

I made a version of this point last week writing about AEO certifications, and it holds here too: the durable idea is clarity, not format. The packaging keeps changing, so the source has to be worth citing under whatever rules ship next.

Without benchmarks you'll end up pivoting every quarter and calling it agility. The long-term play is holding positions whose value doesn't depend on volatile display logic:

• Content that answers buyer questions on properties you control.

• Presence in the communities that still feed the answers.

Reddit's consulted share never collapsed the way the citation share did, so being read still shapes the response even when the credit disappears.

Marketers have been playing whack-a-mole with algo updates since human beings stopped counting websites but the platforms can't do a hard reset whenever an LLM update ships.

A diversified, benchmarked, long-horizon approach would have barely noticed the entire event.

The denominator will change again, and again, and again. You'll have to pulse check your strategy frequently and be super duper chill with that.

For those of you still hanging around, just like the Don McLean reference, clearly Reddit isn't dead, just like the music never died.

A plane crashed but the music was fine. Answer on.