We re-measured the same 150 questions from Experiment 4, with the same protocol, five weeks later. The result: Reddit dropped from 16% of the responses from ChatGPT in Spanish to less than 1%, the entire ranking of sources was reordered, and the new winners are very much from our market: the Bank of Spain, the CNMV, YouTube, and a Wikipedia that is starting to return. And we contrasted it with six months of real scans of 241 brands within CreceRank: the decline is not an average, it is brand by brand. None increased.
In July we published Experiment 4: 96,785 citations mapping what sources AI uses in Spanish and English. Reddit was at 16% of ChatGPT's responses in Spanish, and it was the second source in English.
Five weeks later, signs started circulating that something had changed. So we did what almost no one can do: ask exactly the same thing again and compare. Same 150 frozen prompts, same location, same protocol. If something moved, it wouldn't be due to measuring differently.
It moved. And the map that remained is different from what the studies in English tell you.
Between July and August 2026, ChatGPT rebuilt its source system. In Spanish, Reddit and mainstream media were the big losers; official sources, YouTube, and Wikipedia, the winners. And Reddit did not disappear from the map: it moved to Google.
This experiment combines two independent data sources that tell the same story through different paths.
Reddit in ChatGPT: from 16% to less than 1%In July, if you asked ChatGPT in Spanish about a product, a tool, or advice, 1 in 6 responses included Reddit among its sources. In August, practically none. The drop was replicated in both measurement waves and also occurred in English, where Reddit fell from 22.6% to 3.2% of responses, with a 95% confidence interval placing the drop between 15 and 24 points.
This is not the normal variation of a model that responds differently each day. It is a regime change: ChatGPT stopped using Reddit as a source, in all languages and in all categories we measure.
Presence of Reddit in the responses of each engine, asking in Spanish, July versus August:
% of responses where reddit.com appears, questions in Spanish. Bars to scale within the graph.
If you are working on presence in Reddit for your brand, in the Hispanic market that effort today pays off in one place: Google AI Overviews. In ChatGPT, it no longer makes you visible.
When we went to verify if the drop was exclusive to Reddit, we found something deeper: the entire Spanish top of July collapsed at once.
| Top source of ChatGPT in Spanish | July | August | Relative change |
|---|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 16.0% | 0.7% | −96% |
| techradar.com | 14.0% | 2.6% | −81% |
| ocu.org | 12.8% | 3.1% | −76% |
| elpais.com | 10.4% | 2.6% | −75% |
| rankia.com | 8.9% | 2.9% | −67% |
| helpmycash.com | 7.5% | 3.1% | −59% |
| cnmv.es | 1.8% | 3.3% | +83% |
| youtube.com | 2.8% | 3.9% | +39% |
| wikipedia.org | 0.4% | 1.3% | +225% |
% of ChatGPT responses in Spanish where each domain appears.
In July, the number 1 source of ChatGPT in Spanish appeared in 16% of the responses. In August, its new number 1 source is PubMed with just 4.6%, followed by Salesforce, YouTube, and the banking client's portal of the Bank of Spain. The profile has flattened: ChatGPT no longer has star sources, and those that are growing the most are official and institutional.
And an important nuance: it’s not that it cites less. It cites more than before, but distributes the citations in a much more diverse long queue: public bodies, primary sources, official documentation.
+225%+39%The controlled experiment compares two snapshots, July and August. The visibility scans that CreceRank runs daily for 241 brands allow us to see the whole picture: what percentage of ChatGPT's citations went to Reddit, month by month, since March.
% of ChatGPT citations pointing to reddit.com, per month. Scans from CreceRank, March-August 2026, excluding our own brands.
The shape of the curve matters: peak in the second half of May, plateau from June to July around 3%, and a sharp cut in the first week of August. It is not a smooth decline: it is a before and after with a date.
And it's not that there are fewer data: August has almost triple the ChatGPT citations than May in our scans (42,000 vs. 15,000). There are more measurements than ever and less Reddit than ever. The other engines show nothing similar: Gemini drops smoothly from 2.24% to 1.12%, AI Overviews remains stable, and Perplexity never relied on Reddit in this cut.
Every average study can be challenged the same way: could it be that the sample changed? To rule this out, we took the same 30 brands with sufficient ChatGPT citations before and after the cut, excluding our own, and tracked them one by one.
Of the 30 brands: 21 fell, 9 remained flat because they were already close to zero, and none increased. Zero. When a change affects all brands in the same direction, it’s not the customer mix: it’s the engine.
This is how it looks for the brands that depended most on Reddit as a source in ChatGPT:
| Company | Country | May-July | August |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gaming house | Uruguay | 9.2% | 4.4% |
| Marketing agency | Uruguay | 8.4% | 1.0% |
| GEO/SaaS platform | Uruguay | 7.9% | 7.0% |
| Insurer | Uruguay | 7.2% | 1.6% |
| Legal tech | USA | 5.8% | 2.1% |
| Legal services | Uruguay | 5.0% | 3.4% |
| Software studio | USA | 4.9% | 0.4% |
| IT services | USA | 4.9% | 1.9% |
| Digital agency | Mexico | 4.3% | 0.4% |
% of ChatGPT citations from each company that point to Reddit. Anonymized companies: we show industry and country.
The pattern crosses verticals: agencies, a development studio, an insurer, a gaming house, legal. What they have in common is not the industry: it’s ChatGPT. And the overall picture confirms it: in May, 19 of the 40 brands in the sample had Reddit in at least 5% of their citations. In August, 2 of 52.
The only one that hardly fell is a GEO/SaaS platform (7.9% to 7.0%). Why? Because the conversation about that type of tools continues to happen natively on Reddit, and ChatGPT still goes there when the question demands it. The cut is not that Reddit has disappeared from the internet: it’s that ChatGPT stopped using it as a general shortcut to recommend brands. Where the Reddit thread is THE source, it continues to cite it.
A final note: in these brand searches, the gap left by Reddit was not taken by any specific platform. It didn't go to YouTube or Wikipedia: it diluted across the rest of the web, directories, brand sites, local press. In the general questions of the controlled experiment, we did see official sources, YouTube, and Wikipedia rise; in brand recommendations, the distribution simply atomized.
In the coming weeks, you will read analyses in English about this same phenomenon, and almost all will tell this story: "Reddit fell in ChatGPT but migrated to Perplexity, which tripled it from 7% to 23% of the responses."
It's true. In English. In Spanish, that migration does not exist: Perplexity never cited Reddit in our language (0.6% of the responses before the change, 0.7% after). The forum that feeds the Anglo AI simply does not form part of the Spanish source ecosystem of Perplexity, which relies on local websites, as we showed in Experiment 4.
The Spanish version of the phenomenon is different: here Reddit moved to Google AI Overviews (from 14.3% to 18.7%), and the gap it left in ChatGPT was filled by official Spanish sources like the Bank of Spain and the CNMV.
Is the same as Experiment 4, now confirmed in motion: studies in English describe the Anglo market, not yours. Every time you read "the AI now cites X", ask yourself: in what language and from where did they measure?
Let’s be precise about what the data allows us to affirm and what it does not. What we know: the change coincides with the August ChatGPT update, is specific to ChatGPT (the other engines do not accompany the drop) and was replicated in two independent measurements. What we do not know: whether there was also a commercial decision regarding Reddit's data. The agreement between OpenAI and Reddit remains publicly valid; what exists is an ongoing renegotiation. Documented correlation, unconfirmed contractual cause.
No. Reddit disappeared from ChatGPT, but in Spanish it rose in Google AI Overviews to 18.7% of responses, and in English it also grew strongly in Perplexity. It remains one of the most cited platforms in the ecosystem; what changed is which engine uses it and, therefore, where it makes you visible.
The change coincides with the ChatGPT update in early August 2026, which reordered its entire source system: it wasn't just Reddit that fell, the entire top fell and official sources, YouTube, and Wikipedia rose. There is no evidence of a break in the agreement between OpenAI and Reddit, although there is a public renegotiation of the data licenses underway.
A much flatter and more official profile: PubMed leads with 4.6% of the responses, followed by Salesforce, YouTube, the banking client's portal of the Bank of Spain, the CNMV, and Finect. The big players from July, Reddit, TechRadar, OCU, El País, and Rankia, fell between 59% and 96%.
In five ways: the comparison uses exactly the same 150 frozen questions from July; the drop was replicated in two independent waves from August with almost identical numbers; the 95% confidence interval is far from zero; the other three engines do not accompany the drop; and an independent data source, the actual scans of 241 brands in CreceRank, shows the same curve with six months of history and the cut in the same week.
It affects almost all, but not equally. Among the 30 brands we tracked before and after, 21 dropped, 9 remained flat, and none increased; the most dependent lost between 4 and 7 points. The exception is the niches whose native conversation lives on Reddit, such as GEO tools and SaaS: there ChatGPT continues to cite threads because it has no better source.
On the contrary: it updates and confirms its two central warnings. First, that the rankings of AI sources change weekly, not yearly. Second, that what is measured in English does not describe the market in Spanish: the "migration to Perplexity" that you will see in Anglo analyses did not exist in our language.
Yes. We publish the complete dataset of the two measurements in CSV under CC0 license, with each query, each citation, and its original URL. The link is in the transparency section.
We do not ask you to believe us: check the data. We publish the two complete measurements of the experiment under CC0 license: the 18,000 queries and the 174,491 citations with their original URL, engine, language, and date. Replicate the analysis, look for errors, or use it for your own study.
As an additional source, we use the data from the monitored brands in CreceRank (the six-month curve and the company cut from sections 05 and 06). For the confidentiality of our clients, that data is published aggregated and anonymized in the article itself, not in the downloadable dataset.
Measurements from July and August + reading guide · CC0 License · If you use it, we appreciate the link.Álvarez, S. and Cardozo, S. (2026). Experiment 6: Does Reddit no longer matter in ChatGPT? Study for the Hispanic market. CreceRank. Re-measurement of 18,000 queries to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, July-August 2026. Available at crecerank.com
ChatGPT moved an entire ranking in five weeks. CreceRank monitors daily what the AI responds about your brand and whom it cites, and alerts you when the ground shifts.
