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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and Co-Author of the book, "Zero Click Marketing," the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
Word on the street is that people are losing their minds because Reddit citations in ChatGPT just fell off a cliff.
And I saw the chart. I don't care.
To be clear, the drop is real, at least according to the data we have right now. Promptwatch found that Reddit accounted for about 3.8% of citations in ChatGPT Search between July 18 and August 7. By August 14, that had fallen below 1%, averaging about 0.5% over the next several days. That's an 86% drop. Another company, Petra Labs, also saw about an 80% drop. And Promptwatch itself has cautioned that we don't yet know exactly why it happened, and that the size of the drop should still be treated as provisional.
But even if the number is completely accurate, my reaction is still: okay. So what?
I'm Amanda Natividad, and this is Zero Click Marketing: Field Notes.
The reason I don't care about this particular chart is that I don't think your marketing strategy should depend on the citation behavior of any one platform, especially when that behavior can change overnight.
Of course you can have platform-specific tactics. You should. The way you participate on Reddit should be different from how you show up on LinkedIn, or YouTube, or your own website. Every platform has its own culture, formats, incentives, and norms.
But the larger strategy should come from somewhere more durable. Who are the people you're trying to reach? Where do they spend time? Where do they learn? Where do they talk to each other? Where do they make decisions? And how can you become visible, useful, credible, and trustworthy in those places?
Ideally, you're doing that in more than one place.
If Reddit genuinely matters to your audience, then Reddit probably still matters to your marketing today, even though ChatGPT is citing it less.
Because… why would you suddenly stop caring about Reddit because ChatGPT changed how it retrieves information?
You were getting value there before the AI tool ever got involved. You're participating in a community, learning how people talk about the problem you solve, answering questions, maybe even creating demand. If ChatGPT happens to pick up some of that information and surface your company later, fantastic. That's additional value on top of something worthwhile.
The reverse is where I think things get weird.
If you only started caring about Reddit because somebody showed you a chart saying ChatGPT cites Reddit a lot, and now you're reconsidering the entire thing because another chart says ChatGPT doesn't cite Reddit very much anymore, then you're letting the retrieval behavior of an AI product decide where you do your marketing.
And that retrieval behavior is incredibly unstable. (And to be clear, I don’t think this is you, specifically! But probably… people. Other people. Who don’t have toe foresight to listen to this podcast!)
Here's one of my favorite data points from all of this. Semrush recently ran the same 100 prompts through ChatGPT using minimal reasoning and high reasoning. Only 25.6% of the domains cited by the two modes overlapped. The high-reasoning version also ran 4.6 times as many internal searches and cited almost twice as many sources per response. In other words, you don't even have one consistent thing called “ChatGPT citations.” Two different modes of the same product, answering the same questions, can go looking in very different places.
So imagine trying to build your marketing strategy around that.
You spend three months figuring out how to get mentioned on Reddit because Reddit is winning. Then the retrieval system changes. Maybe product pages are winning now. Maybe next month it's something else. Maybe ChatGPT Thinking mode loves one set of sources while ChatGPT Instant loves another. Meanwhile Gemini has its own preferences, Google AI Overviews have theirs, Perplexity has theirs, and all of these systems are going to keep changing.
That sounds exhausting because it is exhausting.
And there's another piece of research that makes the Reddit panic even funnier to me.
Profound recently analyzed 11.84 billion citations across eight AI systems. In ChatGPT specifically, 47% of citations came from brand-owned websites. Another 30% came from earned media. The exact mix varies considerably by industry, which is important, but company websites are still doing a tremendous amount of work here.
Promptwatch looked at millions of ChatGPT citations from July and found something similar from a different angle: product pages were the single biggest content type, representing 32.8% of classified citations. Back in March, product pages were closer to 18%.
Think about the implications of that for a second.
For months, there's been all this excitement about figuring out which external platforms AI loves. Where do I need mentions? Where do I need links? Do I need Reddit or YouTube? What weird thing do I have to do to convince an LLM that my company exists?
And meanwhile, a huge portion of the information ChatGPT is retrieving is coming from companies' own websites.
Which is wonderfully boring.
Make your website useful. Publish things worth knowing. Explain your products well. Publish original research if you have it. Participate in the communities your audience already cares about. Build a body of evidence across the internet that says: this company knows something, does something useful, and can be trusted.
I think of these as your various homes and apartments across the internet.
You have the property you actually own, which is your website. Then maybe you've built a real presence on LinkedIn. Maybe you have a YouTube channel. Maybe you're active on Reddit. Maybe you've spent years earning relationships with journalists or appearing on industry podcasts. Maybe you have a newsletter people actually read.
You don't control all of those places equally, but together they create a visible digital footprint.
And then with ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Perplexity, whatever, those tools’ job is to make sense of that information and surface some of it when somebody asks a relevant question.
That's why I think AI visibility is best understood as a benefit of good marketing.
Yes, measure it. Absolutely pay attention to what the models are saying about you. Learn how retrieval works. If you discover that your product documentation is confusing an AI system, fix it. These are signals that can make your marketing better.
But I would be extremely wary of allowing those signals to dictate the entire strategy, because today's citation winner can become tomorrow's 80% decline.
The durable question is still the old-fashioned one: where does my audience spend time, and am I doing something valuable enough there that they know who I am and trust me?
If the answer includes Reddit, great. Keep doing Reddit.
If the answer includes your website, LinkedIn, YouTube, industry press, podcasts, communities, events, newsletters, whatever — build those things too.
Create enough genuine presence across the internet that when AI systems go looking for information about your category, they have a lot of good evidence to find.
AI is a means to an end. You build the reputation. You build the evidence. You build the relationships and the presence. And hopefully, AI surfaces them.
And if ChatGPT changes its mind about Reddit again next Tuesday?
Cool.
You've still got a marketing strategy.
Tune in next week because I'm reposting my interview on Chris Savage's Talking Too Loud podcast (produced by Wistia).