Your AI visibility strategy had a bad August.
Three things happened this month to call attention to how you think about AI visibility. All three landed inside twelve days.
On August 8, ChatGPT changed where it goes looking when it answers a question.
Instead of searching broadly and seeing what comes back, ChatGPT started narrowing its searches to one website at a time and citing what that website says. That jumped from well under 1% of its background searches to about 17%, roughly a 46-fold increase. What it finds on a company's own website is official pages and documentation. Forum threads, like Reddit, never enter the picture.
Reddit felt it immediately. It plummeted from 3.83% of ChatGPT's citations down to 0.52% in under a week, an 86% collapse.
On August 18, Google began rolling out a lengthy spam update, but gave no explanation of what it changed or why, so site owners were left to work it out from their own traffic.
On August 20, Google then handed publishers a new button that readers can click to mark a website as a preferred source, which then surfaces more often in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Twelve days. Three changes to which sources get chosen.
We don't think this is a Reddit obituary, however. Reddit went through the same thing in September 2025, dropping from roughly 7% to roughly 1%, then recovering to around 3%.
It's worth noting that for two years the advice in the AI visibility category has been about placement. Go build presence on Reddit. Get into the sources the AI engines seem to like. That advice wasn't wrong. It was just aimed at the layer that is subject to change without warning. Something for us all to keep in mind. After all, look at Google's traditional search page ranks.
What doesn't change is what an AI engine looks for when it re-sorts: evidence it can verify, named experts attached to real claims, and consistent facts about your company that hold up across independent sources across the internet instead of claims living only on your website.
Placement is rented. Credibility is owned. Three weeks ago that sounded like a distinction worth arguing about. Not anymore.
Get Found. Get Cited. Get Chosen.
