Brand and company citations have become
increasingly important in OpenAI ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. As artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic services reshape search, understanding where a brand appears, and why, has become
essential.
Searching for answers, BrightEdge pulled data to determine how brand mentions in Reddit and LinkedIn continue to change. Analysts classified each prompt by topic, query intent,
functional job, and the other sources cited alongside these social channels.
The goal was to understand not only that brands are cited, but the specific conditions under which each AI engine
pulls in the information to provide answers for queries. And the data shows that ChatGPT and AI Overviews do not treat these social media the same way.
Reddit citations are mostly
treated as collective opinions on Google AI Overviews, whereas LinkedIn gets treated on ChatGPT as a credible reference alongside the most authoritative publishers across the web.
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When ChatGPT
answers users’ “how-to” questions, LinkedIn accounts for about 33% of the sources it cites. For the same queries, Google’s AI Overviews reference LinkedIn 22% of the time.
On Google AI
Overviews, Reddit is cited with YouTube appearing alongside it in roughly 36% of citations, while Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are close behind, and editorial authorities appear about 6% of the
time.
In ChatGPT query responses, patterns are inverted. Reddit is cited alongside Healthline, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Encyclopedia Britannica information, while publishers that
have earned authoritative credit appear about 36% of the time. Other social platforms barely show up.
Both engines cite these channels mainly to answer how-to, definitional and
verification questions, but ChatGPT works much harder to provide procedural and causal answers, while Google AI Overviews automatically aggregates and displays information side by side so users can
immediately evaluate options without clicking multiple links.
The same Reddit citation can include and offer two different insights based on the AI engine that pulls the data for the
query.
BrightEdge measured how often a Reddit citation appears next to other social and user-generated content platforms compared to when it appears next to editorial authorities, and the two
engines returned nearly identical information.
A Reddit citation appears next to other social and user-generated content in Google AI Overviews about 44% of the time and about 6% in ChatGPT.
For editorial authorities, those percentages are 6% and 36% of the time, respectively.
Citations have become very important because the click has become optional.
With
Similarweb’s clickstream panel, Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, found that in the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click as a result of AI features,
instant answers, and other UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences.
“Google is becoming a walled garden,” Fishkin wrote in a blog post.
In 2024,
U.S. zero-click searches on Google stood at 60.45%, up 12.5% in clickless queries within two years.
Fishkin called the change “the fastest acceleration of this phenomenon in the last decade,
almost certainly driven by the massive growth in AI Overviews, now found on more than 20% of all searches, which, when present, reduces clickthrough rates by nearly 60%.”
Meltwater, a
global media intelligence company that monitors AI visibility, analyzed 5 million citations across eight AI applications powered by large language models (LLMs).
The company mapped
how each model sources information, including ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and CoPilot. The differences could reshape the way brand teams
operate.
The analysis found that each LLM has developed its own citation hierarchy. For example, ChatGPT skews heavily toward institutional authority, with 51% attributed to earned and
news.
Grok’s top five sources are linked entirely to social platforms, with LinkedIn citations up 217% month-over-month, whereas Claude disproportionately favors structured data
aggregators.
Earned media continues to gain the spotlight as AI fuels attention. Earned media and news citations rose to 39.5% in April
— up from 38.3% in March — while corporate-owned content such as blogs, websites, documentation declined from 53.2% to 50.3%.
Interestingly, YouTube has become an AI infrastructure,
ranking in the top five-cited sources for six of the eight models, and is the number one source for Perplexity, Gemini, and both Google AI experiences.
Although it represents only 1% of
total citations, Wikipedia appears in the top five for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
On Perplexity, Wikipedia citations surged 412% month-over-month, according to Meltwater
data.
