This week: ChatGPT and Reddit are seeing other people, Google says everything in moderation, LinkedIn is grading your comments, and X stops paying for copy-paste.
Reddit held a steady 3.8% share of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through August 7. On August 14 that share collapsed to under 1%, and the August 14-17 average was 0.5%, an 86% drop.
The twist: nobody's quite sure what happened. The company that spotted the drop says its numbers are provisional. OpenAI says it doesn't set how visible any one site is, and that ChatGPT still cites Reddit. The trackers can't even agree on the starting point. One put Reddit at about 4% of citations before the drop, another at nearly 17%. Google's AI answers tell a different story: over the same period, Reddit citations fell just 11% in AI Overviews and 31% in AI Mode, a slow slide compared with ChatGPT's overnight drop. Whatever happened, it happened mostly inside ChatGPT.
So where did Reddit's share go? New York firm Petra Labs found much of it went to company-owned websites. The brands ChatGPT recommended barely budged. It changed its sources, not its opinions.
If your AI strategy leaned on Reddit, that's the lesson: visibility you build on someone else's platform can shift overnight. No single channel guarantees you show up in AI answers.
The one source you fully control is your own website. If it clearly answers the questions your customers ask, you stay in the running no matter which platform ChatGPT favors next. The AI visibility tools we've worked with are racing to keep up, and right now they're pushing us toward our own brand sites and the platforms we control.
Do this:
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, and even Claude the questions your customers ask most, and see which sites get cited.
Make sure your own site answers each of those questions in plain language. Use the question as a heading, answer it in the first sentence or two, then add the details in your customers' words. Publish it as a real page on your site, like an FAQ or an article, not a PDF or image.
If you've only been posting on Reddit to show up in AI, start joining real conversations there instead. That's what made Reddit worth citing in the first place.
Sources: Promptwatch, Semrush, 97th Floor, Axios, Mi3
Google's August 2026 Spam Update ran from August 18 to August 21. It was global, applied across all languages, and was the third confirmed spam update of the year. Google called it a "NORMAL" spam update, but the impact on search results wasn't necessarily normal.
Here's what that looked like. SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords across 20 industries. During the update, about 1 in 6 pages ranking in Google's top 10 fell out of the top 100 entirely, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 during a quiet stretch in July. Google didn't announce a new policy or say what it was after, and one of the bigger conversations in the industry since is whether it's getting tougher on AI-generated content.
And there's another spam update underway. On September 24, Google released a new spam update, its fourth of the year (March, June, August, and now September), again calling it normal. This rollout may take up to two weeks.
None of this is a reason to stop using AI. We use it every day as a brainstorming partner, to clean up copy, or to get a first draft started. But Google's own guidance says it rewards content that shows real experience and expertise, however it's made, and that matches what we're seeing. Pages that say nothing new are the risk, whoever or whatever wrote them.
Do this:
Check Search Console for traffic drops around August 18 to 21, and keep watching through the current rollout.
Find pages that repeat what's everywhere else, then improve them, merge them, or cut them.
Let AI draft. Have someone who knows the subject add real examples, numbers, and a point of view before it publishes.
Sources: Search Engine Land, Be Found Online, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, Google Search Central
LinkedIn now ranks comments by how relevant they are to each viewer, using signals like professional interests, connections, and engagement activity, instead of showing them in the order they were posted. Comments matter more than ever: LinkedIn reports that time spent reading them has grown 18% year over year. They've also become a target, with low-quality and AI-generated comments flooding in to farm visibility.
How much? AI detection startup Pangram Labs found that 30% of comments across 57,000 public LinkedIn posts between April and June were entirely AI-generated. LinkedIn has not confirmed that figure.
When comments showed in order, the fastest one sat near the top, so a quick "Great post!" was an easy way to get seen. Relevance ranking takes that away. It also changes what your numbers mean: if a real share of comment activity is automated, brands chasing comment counts may be counting bots. That's good news for anyone who actually has something to say.
Do this:
Keep commenting on posts (LinkedIn likes to promote real conversation), and make every comment count. Add a fact, a personal experience, or an honest question.
Check which comments land at the top of posts in your industry, and notice what they have in common. That's what LinkedIn is rewarding.
Look at your auto-commenting tools. Check your browser extensions and any growth or engagement tools your team or agency uses. If something comments or posts on your behalf without you reviewing it, turn it off: LinkedIn prohibits third-party automation and can restrict accounts that use it. If you use LinkedIn's built-in AI suggestions, treat them as a first draft and add one detail only you would know.
Sources: Lindsey Gamble, Social Media Today
X wound down its Revenue Sharing program on September 7 and replaced it with Original Content Rewards. The new program pays creators based on views from verified users, but only for original writing, photos, videos, and memes. Reposts with captions don't count.
X drew the line clearly. Adding a caption to someone else's video that just describes what's happening doesn't count. Creative editing, real commentary, or original analysis does. To qualify, creators need X Premium, 500 verified followers, and 500,000 home timeline views in 90 days.
This changes how X pays creators, not how it ranks posts. But put it next to the other stories in this issue: Google, LinkedIn, and now X are all rewarding people who make something and discounting people who just pass things along.
Do this:
Look at your last month of posts on any platform and count how many were truly yours.
When you share someone else's work, add your own take, data, or experience.
If you work with creators on X, confirm they qualify before you plan around their reach.
Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Endgadget