AEO is changing weekly and often unpredictably. I've been doing AEO landscape reports weekly all year and there are no metrics I can track weekly to do a consistent JERK reading on. The closest I've found is where the answers are coming from, are they coming from your website, or elsewhere? It varies by LLM and account type within each LLM, but there are trends across all of them.

In May I told you the fifteen sites AI cites most often; it was run across all the major AI tools. Much of that list is consistent, but not all.

Position — where things stand

LLMs tend to cite a handful of sources versus the top ten Google links we got used to. On Google right now, the top cited sites are per Ahrefs Brand Radar:

Velocity — what is moving

The top five stayed the same this month and have been consistently in the top 10.

The top five are consistent. The rest are shifting but still highly ranked. KBB is Kelley Blue Book, car-buying is one of the biggest question categories there is. Also, in the top 5, with the exception of Google itself, they are all sites you create content for.

Acceleration — the change is speeding up

One month of movement could be noise.

But the direction has been consistent and the pace is picking up. I have two clean months from Ahrefs and almost a year of my own briefings point in the same direction, even if it is qualitative.

In February, Reddit was the story. By August, YouTube had passed it. Community and video together now make up somewhere between half and a little more of the top-source citations. Even within communities it is video that is growing the most.

The share moving into those platforms is not trickling. It is accelerating, and it is moving away from ordinary business websites.

Even if your site is optimized and wonderful, the AI models go to a few sources they trust, and while the ranking varies slightly between LLMs, the top sites are pretty consistent. Here is where each engine goes, July 2026 * Data per Ahrefs Brand Radar for the first four LLMs.  Claude is not tracked by Ahrefs and is very different; it uses long-form editorial and institutional sources: New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, FT, Reuters, NIH and almost no social and video. If your buyers use Claude, the YouTube-and-Reddit playbook is the wrong; earned editorial coverage is the path.

ChatGPT's monthly Reddit figure of 16.7% is a month-long average from Ahrefs measures share among the top sources. It predates the August 14 jerk described below with data from Promptwatch, which measures share of all citations, not just top sources.

So, the LLMs use different sources. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia and dictionaries. Perplexity is nearly a third YouTube. Gemini is nearly a third Reddit. Claude relies on editorial sites.

The advice to "be on the top sites" means more once you know what your buyer uses.

Jerk — unexpected

This month's jerk was a sharp drop in Reddit citations on August 14. In under a week, Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations fell from an average of 3.83% to 0.52% (Promptwatch). Earlier this year it was close to 12% of all ChatGPT citations (Similarweb, Jan to Feb 2026, via 5W)

A change on Reddit's side would have hit every LLM, but this impacted ChatGPT only, in one day.

Here is what happened, as far as anyone outside OpenAI can tell.

Six days earlier, on August 8, OpenAI changed how ChatGPT turns a question into searches (Promptwatch, Qwairy), kept its open web searches ("what do people say about this") and added direct questions to specific named sites ("what do you say."), nearly doubling its searches per answer. Those added questions almost never point at Reddit

ChatGPT is still reading Reddit. One practitioner watched a single answer pull in 221 pages (HeyBuffy). Eighty-four were Reddit threads. Not one was cited. Read. Not linked.

A year-long pattern reversed in under a week. The search change is the best available explanation, and the trackers themselves note the exact size of the drop is provisional.

Let's move out of the weeds into what can help you today:

The 5-Minute Practice

Scout your own name

You have seen where the answer comes from. Now find out whether you are in it. Ask your favorite LLM:

 Where does my business site [your business URL] show up online in the places AI engines cite most? For each of these sites that applies to my buyer, tell me whether you can find any mention of my business, and if so, roughly what it says: Reddit, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Forbes, Medium, Substack, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, FT, Reuters, NIH, Walmart, Alibaba, Merriam-Webster, KBB, and any industry directory for my industry. If you find my business associated with more than one identity, industry, or description, say so and describe each one. State where you find nothing. List any other businesses like mine that got named by rank and URL, not general guides or directories. Which LLMs am I most likely to be found in? Treat this as what you can see today, not including caches which may lag.

 If you are waiting for AEO to settle down, that is unlikely to happen this year.

While the LLMs change the rules weekly and do not tell anyone, they also continue to trust the same sites and behave in consistent ways we can build toward.

If you are getting less traffic, fewer leads, this may be why.

The next AEO workshop is the current read on what still counts. https://www.designrosetta.com/training-and-services

Best wishes,

Rose

SOURCES

"The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Gemini (July 2026)." Ahrefs Blog. Accessed August 31, 2026. https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-gemini/

"The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Overviews (July 2026)." Ahrefs Blog. https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-ai-overviews/

"The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Perplexity (July 2026)." Ahrefs Blog. https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-perplexity/

"Top Domains Cited by LLMs: August 2026." Accessed August 31, 2026. https://obsurfable.com/resources/reports/top-domains-cited-by-llms-august-2026   

"Claude AI Citation Study." Accessed August 31, 2026. https://otterly.ai/blog/claude-ai-citation-study/

"Why Did ChatGPT Stop Citing Reddit?" Accessed August 31, 2026. https://promptwatch.com/blog/chatgpt-stop-citing-reddit. 

"The 5W Citation Source Audit, Q1 2026." 5W Public Relations, May 11, 2026. Accessed August 31, 2026. https://www.5wpr.com/research/citation-source-audit-q1-2026/

"ChatGPT Stopped Citing Reddit: The Mechanism Behind the Collapse." Accessed August 31, 2026. https://www.qwairy.co/blog/chatgpt-reddit-citations-collapse-august-2026

"Is Reddit Still Cited in ChatGPT?" Accessed August 31, 2026. https://heybuffy.com/blog/is-reddit-still-cited-in-chatgpt