Data study · collected
Reddit appears on Google’s first page for 98.5% of 200 commercial-intent queries — “best X”, “X vs Y”, “X alternatives”, “is X worth it” — against 54.2% of 59 non-commercial control queries. It usually ranks high: average first position 1.7, with 92% of those queries putting a Reddit thread in the top 3. Measured August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026, US/English, one sample per query.
98.5%
of commercial-intent queries have at least one Reddit thread on Google page one — 197 of 200.
54.2%
of informational controls
#1
most common page-one domain
260 frozen queries · us/en · collected August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026
98.5%
of 200 commercial-intent queries return at least one Reddit thread on Google's page one.
54.2%
of the 59 non-commercial control queries do — a +44.3-point gap that is the whole story.
92%
of commercial queries put Reddit inside the top 3 organic results, at an average first position of 1.7.
75.9%
of Google AI Overviews on commercial queries visibly cite Reddit (145 of 191).
A single "Reddit is on N% of page ones" figure means nothing without a baseline. Every engine below was run against the same 260 queries: 200 commercial-intent and 60 deliberately non-commercial controls (factual lookups, developer syntax, health questions, household how-tos).
control 54.2% · +44.3 pts · n=200
control 51.7% · +44.3 pts · n=199
control 0% · +30.5 pts · n=200
control 0% · +3.3 pts · n=181
| Engine | Collected via | Commercial queries answered | Commercial w/ Reddit | Control w/ Reddit | Gap (pts) | Mean Reddit results | Avg first position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browser | 200 | 98.5% | 54.2% | +44.3 | 1 | 1.7 | |
| Brave | Crawlora API | 199 | 96% | 51.7% | +44.3 | 1.3 | 2.3 |
| DuckDuckGo | Crawlora API | 200 | 30.5% | 0% | +30.5 | 0.4 | 5.2 |
| Bing | Crawlora API | 181 | 3.3% | 0% | +3.3 | 0 | 5 |
All four shapes are commercial-intent, all measured on Google, 50 queries each. The spread between them is what tells you which pages are worth going after.
| Query shape | Queries | With Reddit | Reddit in top 3 | Mean Reddit results | Avg first position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| “is X worth it” | 50 | 100% | 100% | 1 | 1 |
| “X alternatives” | 50 | 100% | 96% | 1 | 1.7 |
| “X vs Y” | 50 | 98% | 92% | 1 | 1.8 |
| “best X” | 50 | 96% | 80% | 1 | 2.4 |
Reddit's reputation as a software-review venue understates it. The same measure across five commercial verticals, 40 queries each.
| Vertical | Queries | With Reddit | Reddit in top 3 | Mean Reddit results | Avg first position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS & software | 40 | 100% | 100% | 1 | 1.6 |
| Ecommerce & products | 40 | 100% | 90% | 1 | 1.8 |
| B2B services | 40 | 97.5% | 92.5% | 1 | 1.8 |
| Local services | 40 | 97.5% | 90% | 1 | 1.7 |
| Consumer advice | 40 | 97.5% | 87.5% | 1 | 1.8 |
Google's AI Overview is the one AI answer surface measurable at this sample size, because it renders inside the same result page. It appeared on 95.5% of commercial queries and visibly cited an average of 8 sources; Reddit was among them 75.9% of the time, making it the #1 most-cited domain. Sources hidden behind the overview's "show more" control were not expanded, so these are floors, not ceilings.
95.5%
of 200 commercial queries showed an AI Overview (191 of 200).
75.9%
of those overviews cite Reddit (145 of 191), across an average of 8 visible sources.
15.8%
of control-query overviews cite Reddit (9 of 57) — the same commercial/informational split as the organic results.
| Domain | Overviews citing it | Share of overviews |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 145 | 75.9% |
| youtube.com | 137 | 71.7% |
| google.com | 27 | 14.1% |
| facebook.com | 23 | 12% |
| forbes.com | 22 | 11.5% |
| zapier.com | 21 | 11% |
| quora.com | 20 | 10.5% |
| nerdwallet.com | 17 | 8.9% |
| cnet.com | 12 | 6.3% |
| g2.com | 9 | 4.7% |
| rtings.com | 9 | 4.7% |
| zoho.com | 9 | 4.7% |
| nytimes.com | 8 | 4.2% |
| pcmag.com | 8 | 4.2% |
| bobvila.com | 7 | 3.7% |
Read the two rates together. An assistant that rarely searches the web scores near zero on Reddit for a reason that has nothing to do with Reddit — so the table reports how often each engine cited ANY source alongside how often it cited Reddit. "Cited" means the rendered answer LINKED the source; a source merely named in the prose is tracked separately and never counted here. Chat assistants have to be driven one query at a time, so they were run over a stratified subset rather than the full basket.
| Engine | Commercial answers | Cited any source | Cited Reddit | Of answers that cited, cited Reddit | Control cited Reddit | Avg sources cited | Reddit's rank among cited domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 21 | 95.2% | 4.8% | 5% | 0% | 2.7 | not cited |
| Claude | 21 | 4.8% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0.3 | not cited |
| Perplexity | 40 | 100% | 55% | 55% | 0% | 9.7 | #1 |
| Domain | Answers citing it | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| notion.com | 2 | 9.5% |
| rtings.com | 2 | 9.5% |
| techradar.com | 2 | 9.5% |
| vacuumwars.com | 2 | 9.5% |
| adp.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| anytype.io | 1 | 4.8% |
| asana.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| aws.amazon.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| bankrate.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| bbb.org | 1 | 4.8% |
| blockrenovation.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| cfp.net | 1 | 4.8% |
| cloudwards.net | 1 | 4.8% |
| comparisun.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| consumeraffairs.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| Domain | Answers citing it | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| copilot.money | 1 | 4.8% |
| creditkarma.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| empower.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| monarchmoney.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| rocketmoney.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| ynab.com | 1 | 4.8% |
| Domain | Answers citing it | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 22 | 55% |
| forbes.com | 13 | 32.5% |
| nerdwallet.com | 6 | 15% |
| pcmag.com | 5 | 12.5% |
| techradar.com | 5 | 12.5% |
| cnbc.com | 4 | 10% |
| consumeraffairs.com | 4 | 10% |
| finance.yahoo.com | 4 | 10% |
| learn.g2.com | 4 | 10% |
| wsj.com | 4 | 10% |
| zapier.com | 4 | 10% |
| angi.com | 3 | 7.5% |
| g2.com | 3 | 7.5% |
| goodhousekeeping.com | 3 | 7.5% |
| homesandgardens.com | 3 | 7.5% |
Reddit's page-one presence is not evenly spread across the site. These are the subreddits whose threads rank, counted once per query rather than once per engine, so a thread ranking on all four engines counts once.
| Subreddit | Queries | Share of commercial basket |
|---|---|---|
| r/smallbusiness | 11 | 5.5% |
| r/sysadmin | 8 | 4% |
| r/BuyItForLife | 6 | 3% |
| r/homeowners | 6 | 3% |
| r/personalfinance | 6 | 3% |
| r/productivity | 6 | 3% |
| r/dataengineering | 4 | 2% |
| r/Frugal | 4 | 2% |
| r/Bogleheads | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/CleaningTips | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/Cooking | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/devops | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/HomeImprovement | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/humanresources | 3 | 1.5% |
| r/Mattress | 3 | 1.5% |
Counted as the number of commercial queries each domain appears on at least once, so a domain taking three slots on one query does not outrank one appearing on three separate queries.
| Domain | Queries appeared on | Share of commercial queries |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 197 | 98.5% |
| facebook.com | 47 | 23.5% |
| youtube.com | 35 | 17.5% |
| quora.com | 31 | 15.5% |
| forbes.com | 21 | 10.5% |
| gartner.com | 18 | 9% |
| nerdwallet.com | 16 | 8% |
| nytimes.com | 15 | 7.5% |
| pcmag.com | 15 | 7.5% |
| zapier.com | 14 | 7% |
| amazon.com | 13 | 6.5% |
| yelp.com | 11 | 5.5% |
| cnet.com | 9 | 4.5% |
| consumerreports.org | 9 | 4.5% |
| rtings.com | 9 | 4.5% |
| cnbc.com | 8 | 4% |
| medium.com | 8 | 4% |
| linkedin.com | 7 | 3.5% |
| salesforce.com | 7 | 3.5% |
| thisoldhouse.com | 6 | 3% |
Sample. A frozen basket of 260 queries: 200 commercial-intent (five verticals × four query shapes × 10 queries) and 60 non-commercial controls. One sample per query, no repeats. Collected August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026, country us, language en, personalisation off.
What counts as a result.A page-one organic result is a result anchor carrying a heading link. Google’s page one now carries roughly 7.7of these on average, not ten — AI Overviews, People-Also-Ask and video blocks take the rest. Google’s “Discussions and forums” module is counted separately and never merged into the organic share. It appeared on 68.5% of commercial queries and contained Reddit on 100% of those; counting it would take the headline to 100%, which is precisely why we report it separately.
Collection differs by engine.Google was captured from a real desktop browser session. Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo came from Crawlora’s search API, because the Google endpoint answers a bot challenge on most attempts. That is a genuine method difference: treat the cross-engine ordering as directional, not as a controlled comparison.
Coverage is not uniform. Engines returned a scorable page one for Google 259, Bing 241, Brave 259, DuckDuckGo 260 of 260queries. Bing’s misses are bot-challenge responses that cluster on local-services queries, so its vertical mix is not identical to the others’ — one more reason to read the engine comparison loosely. Anything that came back below the 5-result floor (3across all four engines) is excluded from that engine’s denominator rather than counted as a page without Reddit.
Queries were chosen, not sampled. The basket is balanced by construction — ten queries per vertical per shape — so that each cell is comparable. It is not drawn from a search-volume-weighted universe of all queries. So this measures the query shapes Reddit is claimed to dominate, not a traffic-weighted average of everything people search. Read the segment table, not just the headline.
This is a snapshot. SERPs change daily. These numbers describe August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026 and nothing else. We are not publishing a trend line, because one snapshot cannot support one and we would rather say so than draw a line through a single point.
An independent check on the engine ordering. A separate 60-keyword panel collected on July 22, 2026— a different, mixed basket, not this study’s commercial/control split — put Reddit on Google 44.1%, Bing 1.7%, Brave 34.5%. Different basket, so the levels are not comparable to the figures above and this is not a trend line. What it does show is that the engine ordering — Reddit surfaced on Google and Brave, largely absent from Bing — held on unrelated queries weeks earlier, so it is a property of the engines rather than of how we picked these queries.
What the AI half does and does not cover.Google’s AI Overview was measured on the full basket because it renders inside the result page we were already capturing; its sources hidden behind “show more” were not expanded, so that rate is a floor. The chat assistants were driven one query at a time over a stratified subset, in signed-out or incognito sessions where the product offered one. Grok could not be included: it was reporting a service outage throughout the collection window. Gemini was not run. An answer that produced no outbound citation at all is reported as such rather than discarded, because “did not cite anything” is a real result — but a query that never submitted is discarded, never counted as a citation-free answer.
Built with Crawlora’s own Reddit and search APIs — Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo. If you want to run this measurement on your own keyword set, the SERP checker and the rank-checker API do the collection; the SERP Volatility Index tracks how much these result sets move between samples.
For commercial-intent queries, on 98.5% of them — 197 of the 200 queries Google returned a usable page one for, measured August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026 in the US in English. Reddit takes an average of 1 of the roughly 7.7 classic organic slots Google now shows, and when it ranks it ranks high: average first position 1.7, with 92% of queries placing a Reddit thread in the top 3. The comparable figure for non-commercial informational queries is 54.2%.
Of the four commercial query shapes we tested, "is X worth it" is the strongest at 100% and "best X" the weakest at 96%. By vertical, SaaS & software leads at 100% and Consumer advice trails at 97.5%.
Google's AI Overview appeared on 95.5% of commercial queries, and 75.9% of those overviews visibly cited Reddit — making Reddit the #1 most-cited domain across them. Chat assistants split sharply, and the reason is how often they search at all: ChatGPT cited some source on 95.2% of commercial answers and cited Reddit on 4.8% (n=21); Claude cited some source on 4.8% of commercial answers and cited Reddit on 0% (n=21); Perplexity cited some source on 100% of commercial answers and cited Reddit on 55% (n=40). Read those two rates together — an assistant that rarely searches the web scores near zero on Reddit for a reason that has nothing to do with Reddit. Every engine's control-query rate was 0%, the same commercial-versus-informational split the organic results show.
No, but it is far from universal either. On the same commercial-intent basket: Google 98.5% (n=200), Brave 96% (n=199), DuckDuckGo 30.5% (n=200), Bing 3.3% (n=181). Brave surfaces Reddit almost as heavily as Google does, while Bing effectively suppresses it — the same ordering an earlier, unrelated 60-keyword panel showed weeks before this one. Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo were collected through Crawlora's own search API; Google was captured from a real browser session, because the Google endpoint answers a bot challenge on most attempts. That method difference is real, so read the cross-engine ordering as directional rather than as a clean like-for-like comparison.
Yes. The frozen 260-query basket, the collection scripts and every page-one domain observation are committed as open data under CC BY 4.0. Country is us, language en, one sample per query, collected August 17, 2026 – August 18, 2026. A SERP is a point-in-time snapshot: re-running this next month will not reproduce the same result lists, and it is not meant to.