Reddit's ChatGPT citations dropped below 1%, and it still owns Google's forum results
This week is a lesson in not trusting a single chart. Reddit's ChatGPT citations fell off a cliff because of one retrieval setting, while it quietly kept nearly nine in ten of Google's forum results, and Duane Forrester reckons that by 2027 more of your decisions will rest on numbers nobody actually counted. Elsewhere, matching your competitors' content turns out to be a thorough way of saying the same thing, the best subscribers are the people who already turned up in person, and a LinkedIn post can keep circulating long enough that posting daily means competing with yourself. Here are your five.
1. Reddit's ChatGPT citations dropped below 1%, and it still owns nearly nine in ten of Google's forum results
Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations sat near 4% right through July, then slid below 1% after a pair of changes on 8 and 14 August. Cue a small wave of obituaries. But Promptwatch spotted what actually moved: fan-out queries using the site: operator jumped from 0.37% to 16.8% in a single day, and average searches per response went from about 1.08 to 1.83. One platform tweaked a retrieval setting, in other words, and Reddit didn't suddenly become less useful overnight. Over on Google, an Ahrefs analysis of 17 million US results found Reddit in 87.8% of "Discussions and forums" features. Facebook, in second place, managed 38.3%.
Ross Simmonds' team at Foundation (who, in the interests of a fair squint, do a lot of Reddit work for a living) found that 90% of citations in their B2B SaaS buying-prompt analysis pointed at third-party sites, and Reddit took 21% of those. Plenty of the queries where Reddit shows up on Google carry commercial intent too, 40.9% of them. So one chart falls off a cliff and everyone reaches for the shovel, while the forum itself carries on being where people go to find out what a product is actually like. A single retrieval setting is a strange thing to build a funeral around. Foundation
2. By the end of 2027, more of your marketing decisions will rest on numbers nobody actually counted
Duane Forrester has made three predictions for 2027, each with a clear test for proving him wrong. Search ad revenue keeps growing while less of it comes from sending people to other websites (Google's Search ads brought in $63.3 billion in Q2, up 17%, which apparently counts as the first slowdown in six quarters). The ranked results page lives on mostly as a legacy interface. And nobody wins outright, so you're optimising for ranked results and answer engines at the same time. Then he adds a fourth, which is the uncomfortable one: by the end of 2027, the industry will be making more decisions on inferred data than at any point in twenty years, and reporting them with exactly the same confidence.
The evidence is already piling up. Google Analytics shows counted and estimated numbers side by side with no label telling you which is which. The new AI Assistant channel arrived on 13 May without a published list of the referrers it recognises. And during the 1 September outage, reports showed zero traffic while Realtime cheerfully kept showing users the whole time. As Forrester puts it, both kinds of number can be correct, but only one of them can be checked. A confident dashboard and an accurate one are no longer the same thing. Search Engine Journal
3. Matching your competitors' content isn't a strategy, it's just a very thorough way of saying the same thing
Bill Hunt reckons AI-assisted content planning has fallen into a "me-too parity" trap: find what the competition covers, cover it too, repeat. His example is a resort whose all-inclusive page had plenty of words on it but never said where the package stopped and the extra charges started. The "family-friendly" programme page was just as vague about who would actually be supervising the children, which is the one thing a parent wants to know. Lots of content, not much of it useful when someone's trying to make a decision.
His fix is to look for decision gaps instead of content gaps: what does a buyer (or an LLM answering on their behalf) need to know to choose, and do you actually have that information yet? The workflow runs from the customer's decision to their criteria, then to the evidence you have, the gaps, going out to find the missing knowledge, and checking it, with the writing coming last. As Hunt puts it, AI has made turning knowledge into content far cheaper, but "it has not eliminated the need to acquire the knowledge in the first place." Turns out you can't paraphrase your way to something you don't know. Search Engine Journal
4. The best newsletter subscribers are the ones who already turned up in person
Dan Oshinsky at Inbox Collective argues that events are one of the most underrated ways to grow a list, for a fairly simple reason: anyone who gave up an evening to come and listen to you is already interested. He points to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Berkshire Eagle and Utah's KPCW as publishers doing it well. The tactics aren't glamorous: a sign-up box on the registration page tied to the event's topic, QR codes in the programme and on the big screen, slides you can only get by subscribing, and (a sentence I didn't expect to read in 2026) the humble paper sign-up sheet.
There's also auto-enrolling attendees, which Oshinsky himself notes isn't allowed in Europe or Canada, so it's one to admire from a distance over here. The bigger point is that the room already did the hard part. Getting people to show up is the tricky bit, and the email address is a much smaller ask once they're sitting in front of you. Just remember to actually ask for it, which is the step most events somehow forget. Inbox Collective
5. A LinkedIn post can keep circulating for up to three weeks, so posting every day may just mean competing with yourself
Scott M. Graffius's analysis of more than 5.6 million posts puts the half-life of a LinkedIn post at 1,393 minutes, roughly 23 hours. For comparison, a post on X is half-done after about 43 minutes, Facebook after 81, and Instagram after around 18 hours. AuthoredUp, looking at more than 621,000 posts, found LinkedIn now brings back posts that start real conversations for two to three weeks. The less cheerful news, from Richard van der Blom's research: average views are down 50%, engagement is down about 25%, and follower growth has slowed by 59%. Only around 31% of the average feed now comes from people you're actually connected to.
Document posts (the PDF carousels) average 6.60% engagement, while plain text posts struggle to get past 2%, and replying to comments within the first hour still gives a visibility boost of roughly 35%. The suggested rhythm is now three to five posts a week rather than one a day. When a single post can stay in circulation for a fortnight or more, posting daily mostly means your Tuesday post is competing with your Monday one. Fewer posts, then, just better ones. The State of Brand
Small business shout-out
This week's shout-out goes to Tom's Studio, which makes refillable pens for people who like writing things down, and The Wren Write Off is a good example of what they do. It's an everyday pen that you refill rather than throw away, with a lid made from recycled plastic, mostly old disposable pens collected from UK schools. The lids are made with Brothers Make, a design duo who turn plastic waste into new things, and because the recycled plastic varies from batch to batch, every lid comes out a little different. Know a small business we should feature? Reply and let us know.
