Reddit has sued two AI companies in the last eighteen months and is now renegotiating the deal that lets Google use its threads for AI. For a marketing leader who put Reddit into the plan for AI search, that reads like a channel closing, and the Reddit line is the first one finance will ask about.
The useful question is narrower than that. Which AI engines can still read Reddit, how do they get in, and do your threads still reach an answer? Empact Partners records every week which sources ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Claude cite, for itself and for over a dozen of the software companies whose go-to-market it runs as their consultancy.
That count belongs to our Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) work: making a brand the one an AI engine recommends when a buyer asks about its category. We run it on one formula, GEO = UGC + Mentions. User-generated content is what real people say about you in public, mentions are what other sites say, and Reddit carries most of the first half.
Reddit Licenses Its Threads To Some AI Engines And Sues Others
Three routes bring Reddit into an AI answer, and Reddit treats each one differently. The first is a license: a company pays for access to Reddit’s Data API. Google announced its deal in February 2024 and OpenAI’s followed in May 2024, and CNBC reported on 29 October 2026 that the two are Reddit’s biggest data-licensing partners.
The second route is crawling, and Reddit has closed it. Its robots.txt file, read on 31 October 2026, carries a single rule for every crawler on the web: stay out of everything. An engine with no license that obeys that file cannot read a thread directly.
The third route is the one Reddit says it caught. In a suit filed in Manhattan on 22 October 2025 against Perplexity and three scraping firms, Reddit says a test post that only Google’s crawler could see turned up in Perplexity’s answers within hours. Reddit called the test “the digital equivalent of marked bills.” Perplexity denies wrongdoing.
| Engine | How it reaches Reddit | The record, dated |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | A license to Reddit’s Data API | Announced February 2024, reported at $60 million a year. On 22 July 2026 CNBC reported Reddit had discussed shutting off Google’s access for AI use. “In negotiations” on 29 October 2026. |
| ChatGPT | A license to Reddit’s Data API | Announced May 2024. One of Reddit’s two biggest licensing partners as of 29 October 2026. |
| Claude | No announced license, and robots.txt says no | Reddit sued Anthropic on 4 June 2025, alleging its bots accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times after it said they had stopped. Anthropic disputes it. Sent back to California state court in March 2026. |
| Perplexity | No announced license. Reddit alleges it reads Reddit through Google’s results | Sued 22 October 2025. On 31 July 2026 a federal judge let Reddit’s anti-circumvention claims go forward at the pleading stage. |
A map of permissions is not a map of answers. Each row says who may read Reddit, and none of them says how often an engine puts a thread in front of a buyer, which is the only part of this a brand can use.
The Engines That Pay For Reddit Are The Ones That Cite It
We counted it in the Empact Panel, the measurement we built for our partners’ AI visibility and run on our own category too. In four rounds between 4 and 23 October 2026 we put 500 questions about B2B marketing services to the engines, in the US, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, and kept every source each answer cited.
Google AI Mode cited a Reddit thread in 33.6% of its answers, 672 of 2,000. ChatGPT cited one in 11.2%, 225 of 2,000. Claude, asked a 50-question sample each round, cited no Reddit thread in any of its 200 answers. The gap held in every one of the four rounds.
Set beside the map, the two engines that pay Reddit cite its threads, AI Mode three times as often as ChatGPT, and the engine whose maker Reddit is suing did not cite one once.
Our count cannot say the license is the cause. Claude’s answers in the same set cited no LinkedIn post and no YouTube video either, so its zero fits a closed door without proving whose door it is. What it does say is where Reddit work can be seen today: in two engines, at very different rates, and in the third not at all.
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That last comparison comes from Qvery, whose tracking of sixteen software companies’ buyer questions from June to August 2026 found AI Mode citing reddit.com in 27.9% of answers and ChatGPT in 22.8%. Qvery is our sister company and I co-founded it, so weigh its numbers as ours and check the published method before leaning on them.
AI Mode And ChatGPT Cite Different Reddit Threads
Two engines cite Reddit, then, and the next question is whether they cite the same Reddit. Mostly they do not.
AI Mode kept returning to the same threads, about four citations for each one, while ChatGPT spread its citations thinner, about two and a half per thread.
The questions split the same way. Beyond the ones only AI Mode answered from Reddit, 71 got a thread from both engines, 10 from ChatGPT alone, and 176 from neither. Even on those 71, the two engines agreed on at least one thread only 37 times.
So “our threads show up in AI answers” is a claim about one engine at a time. A brand can sit in the threads ChatGPT quotes and be missing from the ones AI Mode quotes for the same question, and an average across engines hides exactly that. The measurement has to run per engine and per thread, and the first run takes an afternoon.
Measure Reddit Per Engine And Per Thread Before You Move Budget
We run the same measurement for partners before anyone touches the Reddit line. Cut down to what a team can do by hand, it fits in a spreadsheet.
- Name the engines your buyers ask. Check which AI engines send you referral traffic and ask your sales team which ones prospects mention on calls. Two or three names will keep coming up.
- Write the questions a buyer asks before a shortlist exists. The category question, the comparison with the market leader, the “best tool for” question, the alternative to the incumbent. A few dozen is enough for a first read.
- Put each question to each engine and keep every source it cites. Use a clean session, asked from the country your buyers are in.
- Count the answers that cite a Reddit thread, over all answers. A thread is a link with /comments/ in it. Count threads, never reddit.com: in our set, 115 of ChatGPT’s 813 citations of reddit.com went to Reddit’s own advertising and case-study pages, which no brand can join.
- List the threads each engine cites, and mark the ones that mention you. That list is the target: the conversations worth a place in, engine by engine.
- Date the run and keep the file. One run is a snapshot. The same questions a month later make the baseline that shows a change when Reddit’s deals move.
Then read the pattern. If AI Mode cites Reddit for a third of your questions, as it did for ours, threads are a large part of what that engine sees of your category, and the Reddit work earns its line. If your buyers live in Claude, Reddit work buys nothing in its answers today, and the case for it rests on the people who read threads.
ChatGPT sits in between. Its rate in our category was a third of AI Mode’s, and its threads were mostly different ones, so for ChatGPT the list from the fifth step matters more than the rate.
Watch The Google Renewal, Not Every Lawsuit
If anything on the map moves your numbers, it is Google. On 22 July 2026 CNBC, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported that Reddit had discussed shutting off Google’s access to its content for AI use, with the $60 million-a-year deal ending soon. On 29 October Reddit’s chief executive said the two were still in negotiations.
Nobody outside the two companies knows the terms, and the reporting is about AI use and says nothing of Google’s search index, so nothing here predicts AI Mode losing Reddit. A brand can still be ready to see it. Keep the dated baseline, rerun the questions after any announcement, and check AI Mode’s thread share first, since it carries most of Reddit’s presence in our answers.
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If AI Mode’s thread share does fall, the mentions half of the formula carries more of the plan: the list articles and review pages an engine cites in place of a thread. A plan already working both halves can move its weight within a quarter. A plan that is Reddit and nothing else has nowhere to move it.
Reddit’s access decisions can also arrive without warning, and not only for scrapers. A user running an approved bot in a single subreddit described losing its API access in July:
“I have a bot that utilized the API, with an approved, labeled account, followed every rule, monitored, mod approval, no issues, high karma, posted on only one sub occasionally with verified time-sensitive information which reddit randomly disabled API access two weeks ago (with no notice) that had operated for years.” — u/zman9119, r/ClaudeCode, Jul 2026
Perplexity sits at the other end of the map. We do not track it, so there is no rate to give you, but its route to Reddit is the one in court: the 31 July ruling kept Reddit’s claims against Perplexity and SerpApi alive, and Reddit wants both blocked from Reddit’s and Google’s sites. Treat a Reddit citation in Perplexity as the least durable citation you have.
Claude has the least at stake for a brand, in our data. Its maker’s dispute with Reddit went back to state court in March, and Claude cited no Reddit thread in any of our four rounds, so there is nothing there to lose yet.
A Thread Still Works On The People Who Read It
None of these deals decides whether a buyer reads a thread. People search Reddit, land on it from Google, and arrive with a question a vendor’s own page will not answer straight, and that visit owes nothing to a license.
Our insurance brokerage partner had five posts with about 100,000 views and no leads. We moved the work from the big subreddits into eight to twelve small ones where its buyers talked, and wrote every post for a buyer, not for views. Within a month the threads brought in about 40 qualified leads, and buyers called to say which thread had sent them.
For KKday, the travel booking platform, a three-month campaign of about twenty new threads a month earned more than 60 explicit mentions of the brand across 3,208,973 views. Neither result needed an AI engine to read the thread.
One run of the measurement fits in an afternoon. The rest does not: the same questions every week, a call on which threads deserve a partner’s presence, and the slow work of being useful in them until a product gets named. Our Generative Engine Optimization workstream runs that part over quarters, since GEO takes months to show in answers, and in practice it looks like this:
Reddit belongs in a GEO plan wherever the engines a brand’s buyers ask can read it, sized by the threads those engines cite rather than by how much gets posted, and that is how we size it for partners.
If your Reddit line is up for review and you would rather settle it on your own numbers than on this quarter’s lawsuits, book a time with me and we will work out together whether we are the right people for it.
