Brand and company quotes are becoming increasingly important in OpenAI ChatGPT and Google AI Overview. As artificial intelligence (AI) and agent services reshape search, understanding where your brand appears and why it appears is essential.
Seeking answers, BrightEdge pulled data to determine how brand mentions on Reddit and LinkedIn continue to change. Analysts categorized each prompt by topic, query intent, job description, and other sources cited along with these social channels.
The goal was to understand not only which brands were cited, but also the specific conditions under which each AI engine ingested information to provide answers to queries. And the data shows that ChatGPT and AI Overview don’t treat these social media the same way.
While Reddit citations are primarily treated as a collective opinion on Google AI Overview, LinkedIn is treated as a trusted reference on ChatGPT alongside the most authoritative publishers on the web.
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ChatGPT accounts for approximately 33% of the sources LinkedIn cites when answering users’ “how-to” questions. For the same query, Google’s AI overview refers to LinkedIn 22% of the time.
In the Google AI overview, Reddit is cited, along with YouTube in about 36% of the citations, followed closely by Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, and editorial authorities appear in about 6% of the citations.
In ChatGPT query responses, the pattern is reversed. Reddit is cited alongside information from Healthline, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Encyclopedia Britannica, with publishers with authoritative credentials appearing about 36% of the time. Other social platforms are barely visible.
Both engines primarily cite these channels to answer how-to, definition, and validation questions, but ChatGPT works much harder to provide procedural, causal answers, while Google AI Overview automatically aggregates and displays information side-by-side so users can quickly evaluate options without having to click multiple links.
The same Reddit quote may contain and provide two different insights based on the AI engine that retrieves the data for the query.
BrightEdge measured how often Reddit citations appeared next to other social and user-generated content platforms compared to when they appeared next to editorial authorities, and the two engines returned nearly identical information.
Reddit quotes appear next to other social and user-generated content about 44% of the time in Google AI Overview and about 6% of the time in ChatGPT. For editorial authorities, the percentages are 6% and 36%, respectively.
Citations have become extremely important as clicks have become optional.
Using Similarweb’s Clickstream Panel, SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin 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, other UI elements that keep searchers in results, and changing user preferences.
“Google is becoming a walled garden,” Fishkin wrote in a blog post.
Zero-click searches on Google in the US in 2024 were 60.45%, a 12.5% increase in clickless queries over two years.
Fishkin said the change is “the most rapid acceleration of this phenomenon in the past decade, almost certainly driven by the massive increase in AI overviews, which are now seen in more than 20% of all searches, and the presence of AI overviews reduces click-through rates by nearly 60%.”
Meltwater, a global media intelligence company monitoring AI visibility, analyzed 5 million citations across eight AI applications powered by large-scale language models (LLMs).
The company mapped how each model sources information, including ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and CoPilot. This difference can reshape the way brand teams operate.
Our analysis revealed that each LLM developed its own citation hierarchy. For example, ChatGPT is heavily biased towards institutional authority, with 51% attributed to acquired information and news.
While Grok’s top five sources are fully linked to social platforms, with LinkedIn citations up 217% month over month, Claude disproportionately favors structured data aggregators.
As AI gains traction, earned media continues to gain traction. Media and news citation rates rose to 39.5% in April, up from 38.3% in March. Meanwhile, company-owned content such as blogs, websites, and documents decreased from 53.2% to 50.3%.
Interestingly, YouTube has become an AI infrastructure, ranking in the top 5 sources of citations for 6 out of 8 models, and the number 1 source for Perplexity, Gemini, and both Google AI experiences.
Wikipedia accounts for only 1% of the total citations, but ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are in the top five.
According to data from Meltwater, Wikipedia citations for Perplexity increased by 412% month-over-month.
