How Reddit Citations Changed in Google AI Mode for High-Stakes Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Consumer Decisions

LLM Authority Index Research | Google AI Mode | Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Decisions | July-September 2026

Reddit remained one of the most visible citation sources in Google AI Mode for high-stakes financial questions during the July-September 2026 research window, but its direct citation visibility declined.

Across the full three-month Google AI Mode financial source slice, Reddit ranked #1 in July, #4 in August and #5 in September by response citation coverage. Full-panel coverage moved from 22.16% in July to 20.70% in August and 17.42% in September. Reddit citation-event share also moved lower, from 5.08% to 4.75% to 3.87%.

The locked platform endpoint published in the parent financial Reddit study shows the same direction. Reddit citation-event share fell from 5.09% to 3.92%, a 22.9% relative decline, while response citation coverage fell from 22.14% to 17.54%, a 20.8% decline.

The strict matched result is also negative. In the locked parent-study Google AI Mode subset, 440 prompt-plus-surface scenarios were paired between July and September. Reddit disappeared in 79 and newly appeared in 25, a 3.16-to-1 loss-to-gain ratio. Matched response coverage fell from 41.36% to 29.09%.

Answer Capsule

Reddit citation visibility declined in Google AI Mode for high-stakes investing, retirement, mortgage and financial decisions from July to September 2026, but the decline was materially smaller than the declines observed in ChatGPT and Perplexity. On the locked platform endpoint, Reddit citation-event share fell 22.9%, from 5.09% to 3.92%, while response citation coverage fell 20.8%, from 22.14% to 17.54%. In the locked matched panel, 440 scenarios were paired: Reddit remained cited in 103, disappeared in 79, newly appeared in 25, and was absent in 233. The exact two-sided McNemar p-value is approximately 0.0000001054.

Key Findings

• Reddit ranked #1 in Google AI Mode financial citations in July, #4 in August and #5 in September.
• Full-panel response coverage moved from 22.16% to 20.70% to 17.42%.
• Full-panel Reddit event share moved from 5.08% to 4.75% to 3.87%.
• The locked platform endpoint shows Reddit event share falling from 5.09% to 3.92%, a 22.9% decline.
• Locked response citation coverage fell from 22.14% to 17.54%, a 20.8% decline.
• The locked strict matched set contained 440 scenarios: 103 both, 79 losses, 25 gains, and 233 neither.
• Matched response coverage fell from 41.36% to 29.09%, down about 29.7%.
• Reddit was 3.16 times more likely to disappear than to newly appear among discordant matched scenarios.
• The exact two-sided McNemar test gives p ≈ 0.0000001054.
• In the fresh Google AI Mode vertical audit, 9 of 11 verticals had lower Reddit citation-event share, while 9 of 11 had lower response coverage.
• Crypto Wallets and Structured Settlements moved against the event-share trend. Annuities and Structured Settlements also increased in response coverage from low July baselines.
• The sharpest event-share declines were Reverse Mortgage (-79.3%), Mortgage Refinance Lenders (-76.9%), Mortgage (-63.9%), Online Financial Advisors (-33.5%), and Online Stock Brokers (-32.9%).
• Crypto Wallets increased 23.2% in event share while response coverage edged down 2.7%. Structured Settlements rose from a one-event July baseline and should be interpreted cautiously.
• In the fresh child reconstruction's 82 Reddit-loss scenarios, no single source replaced Reddit. YouTube and Money.com each newly appeared in 24.4%, Investopedia in 23.2%, Forbes in 22.0%, and Yahoo in 20.7%.

Questions This Study Answers

• How much did Reddit citation visibility change in Google AI Mode for high-stakes financial decisions from July to September 2026?
• Does the decline remain when the same prompt and Google AI Mode surface are paired?
• Which financial verticals and replacement sources changed most as Reddit visibility fell?

Why This Research Belongs in Daily AI Search Marketing Decisions

Article 50 isolates one source, Reddit, inside one surface, Google AI Mode, and one commercial decision family, Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Decisions. That narrow design makes the study useful for day-to-day AI search marketing because it separates measurements that are often collapsed into one visibility score:

1. Where does Reddit rank inside the Google AI Mode financial source market?
2. How often is Reddit actually cited, measured both as citation-event share and response citation coverage?
3. Does the same prompt-plus-surface scenario keep or lose Reddit over time?

In the three-month Google AI Mode financial source study, Reddit still ranked #3 overall at 20.1% response citation coverage. That aggregate position can coexist with meaningful current-month deterioration: Reddit ranked #1 in July, #4 in August and #5 in September, while full-panel response coverage fell from 22.16% to 20.70% to 17.42% and citation-event share fell from 5.08% to 4.75% to 3.87%.

The locked endpoint points in the same direction. Reddit citation-event share fell 22.9%, from 5.09% to 3.92%, while response citation coverage fell 20.8%, from 22.14% to 17.54%. In the locked matched set, 79 scenarios lost Reddit while 25 gained it, a 3.16-to-1 loss-to-gain ratio, and matched coverage fell from 41.36% to 29.09%, about a 29.7% decline.

For publishers, that means a strong three-month aggregate rank should not be presented as proof that current visibility is stable. For financial brands and CMOs, it means source strategy should be monitored with a fixed prompt panel, a defined platform surface, and separate rank, coverage, event-share, and matched-loss metrics.

The vertical audit strengthens that operating case. Nine of 11 financial verticals lost Reddit citation-event share and nine of 11 lost response coverage. Reverse Mortgage fell 79.3% in event share, Mortgage Refinance Lenders 76.9%, Mortgage 63.9%, Online Financial Advisors 33.5%, and Online Stock Brokers 32.9%. Crypto Wallets moved higher in event share while losing a small amount of response coverage, and Structured Settlements rose from a very small July baseline. Those exceptions show why teams should not compress event share and response coverage into one KPI.

The platform comparison is equally important. The locked parent financial study reports Reddit citation-event share changes of -74.6% in ChatGPT, -23.5% in Google AI Overviews, -22.9% in Google AI Mode, -15.3% in Gemini, -87.0% in Perplexity, and no measurable Reddit event share in Microsoft Copilot at either endpoint. One blended 'Reddit visibility in AI' score would hide those differences.

This result also belongs inside the broader Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Citation Authority Study. The frozen parent analysis reports 66.7% median monthly Top 100 persistence, 28.2% median cross-platform Top 100 portability, and an approximate 38.5 percentage-point Persistence-Portability Gap. It also reports 19 domains appearing in all six platform Top 100 lists.

The Google AI Mode financial source study is less persistent within its own surface than the corresponding Google AI Overviews study: 61 domains remained in the monthly Top 100 across July, August and September, and median monthly Top 100 Jaccard similarity was 51.5%. At the same time, the Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews financial Top 100s shared 83 domains, or 70.9% Jaccard similarity. Those are useful platform-category context measures, but Article 50 should not subtract one pairwise Google overlap from one temporal persistence statistic to manufacture a separate Persistence-Portability Gap. The comparison structures are different.

The Persistence-Portability Gap framework therefore helps interpret Article 50 correctly: a source portfolio can be more durable over time than transferable across engines, while an individual source inside that portfolio still loses visibility on one surface.

There is also a frozen-version distinction that should remain visible. Article 07 reports 28.2% median cross-platform portability, while recomputing the final child-study Top 100 lists produces about 27.4%. The published 28.2% remains the authoritative parent value until the entire financial family is rerun through one consolidated pipeline. Article 50 should not silently mix the versions.

Citation visibility should remain separate from brand mentions, recommendation rate, rank, sentiment, citation-recommendation coupling, and downstream business outcomes. This study measures the visible source layer. It does not establish that a Reddit citation caused a lender, adviser, exchange, publisher, mortgage company, investment platform, or product recommendation.

Commercial Action Matrix: What Publishers and CMOs Can Do With the Findings

Where Article 50 Fits in the High-Stakes Consumer Decisions Corpus

Article 50 is a child analysis of two parent studies:

• the Financial Reddit decline study, which provides the locked cross-platform financial endpoint and matched counts; and
• the Google AI Mode Financial source study, which provides the surrounding three-month Google AI Mode source market, including Reddit's #3 aggregate rank and 20.1% response coverage, 61 domains present in all three monthly Top 100s, and 51.5% median monthly Top 100 persistence.

The platform-level context comes from the overall Google AI Mode Top 100 study. The broader interpretation comes from the 2026 AI Citation Authority Study, the overall Reddit decline study, the cross-platform citation-overlap study, the citation-drift study, and the Persistence-Portability Gap framework. Those studies answer different questions and should not be collapsed into one visibility score.

What We Studied

This article is the Google AI Mode platform-specific extension of the broader Reddit decline study for high-stakes investing, retirement, mortgage and financial consumer decisions.

The underlying Google AI Mode financial source study contains:

The 11 source vertical labels are:

1. Annuities
2. Crypto Exchanges
3. Crypto Wallets
4. Gold IRAs and Precious Metals Dealers
5. Mortgage
6. Mortgage Refinance Lenders
7. Online Financial Advisors
8. Online Stock Brokers
9. Reverse Mortgage
10. Robo-Advisors
11. Structured Settlements

All 11 verticals were represented in both July and September. Unlike the insurance series, no vertical had to be removed from the endpoint because of a missing July source dataset.

The published Article 22 source study reports 3,715 deduplicated responses and 28,508 citation events. The later record-level child reconstruction used for the monthly, vertical and replacement-source audits returns 3,716 responses and 28,510 citation events, a difference of one response and two events. This article keeps the published source-study totals when describing Article 22 and labels the later reconstruction separately rather than forcing the two implementations to match.

The Core Finding: Reddit Declined on the Locked Google AI Mode Financial Endpoint

Questions This Section Answers

• Did Reddit lose both event share and response coverage?
• How large was the platform-specific decline?
• Was the decline smaller than the all-platform family decline?

Yes. Both Reddit metrics declined on the locked Google AI Mode endpoint.

The parent financial Reddit study reported a 33.1% all-platform decline in Reddit citation-event share. Google AI Mode declined less sharply than the family aggregate because the family also contains platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, where Reddit visibility fell much faster.

The direct record-level reconstruction from the frozen corpus produces nearly the same Google AI Mode endpoint direction and magnitude. This child article preserves the published parent endpoint so the research series remains internally consistent.

Commercially, the result is best described as weakening rather than disappearance. Reddit remained a major source in the September Google AI Mode financial source market even after losing share and rank.

Reddit Fell Across the Full Three-Month Google AI Mode Financial Panel

Questions This Section Answers

• Was September an isolated decline or part of a three-month pattern?
• Did Reddit lose rank as its coverage fell?
• How does the descriptive monthly panel compare with the locked endpoint?

The full monthly panel also trends lower:

The monthly pattern is gradual rather than abrupt. Reddit response coverage fell about 1.46 percentage points from July to August, then about 3.28 points from August to September.

The rank movement is more visible. Reddit moved from #1 in July to #4 in August and #5 in September, showing that the source market shifted around Reddit even while it remained highly visible in absolute terms.

The locked parent endpoint is the authoritative cross-article comparison because it preserves the published methodology and denominators. The full monthly panel is presented as a platform-specific descriptive audit from the frozen corpus.

The Strict Matched-Prompt Test Shows Nearly Three Losses for Every Gain

Questions This Section Answers

• Did Reddit decline when prompt wording and raw platform surface were held constant?
• How many matched scenarios lost Reddit compared with gains?
• Was the directional imbalance statistically meaningful inside this sample?

The locked Article 29 Google AI Mode matched panel contains 440 scenarios:

Reddit losses outnumbered gains 79 to 25, a 3.16-to-1 imbalance.

Matched Reddit response coverage fell from 41.36% to 29.09%, approximately a 29.7% relative decline.

The exact two-sided McNemar test gives p ≈ 0.0000001054. Within this matched sample, the loss-gain imbalance is inconsistent with a simple 50/50 turnover process. The statistical test does not identify the reason Reddit disappeared from a response.

A direct record-level reconstruction produces 448 unambiguous pairs because of a small difference in the later child-study matching implementation. It produces the 82 losses and 25 gains. This article preserves the published 440-scenario parent panel for series consistency.

The Platform-Specific Vertical Audit Shows Broad but Uneven Decline

Questions This Section Answers

• Did every financial vertical decline inside Google AI Mode?
• Which topics had the largest Reddit losses?
• Which topic moved against the event-share trend?

The platform-specific audit is broad but not perfectly uniform.

Across all 11 financial verticals, 9 declined in Reddit event share and 9 declined in response coverage. Crypto Wallets and Structured Settlements increased in event share. Annuities and Structured Settlements increased in response coverage, with Structured Settlements starting from a one-response July baseline.

The median measurable event-share change was -23.4%, while the median measurable response-coverage change was -26.3%.

The steepest event-share declines were:

1. Reverse Mortgage: 2.53% to 0.52%, down 79.3%.
2. Mortgage Refinance Lenders: 2.87% to 0.66%, down 76.9%.
3. Mortgage: 3.90% to 1.41%, down 63.9%.
4. Online Financial Advisors: 9.39% to 6.25%, down 33.5%.
5. Online Stock Brokers: 5.93% to 3.98%, down 32.9%.

Crypto Wallets moved against the event-share trend, rising from 3.35% to 4.12%, a 23.2% increase, while response coverage slipped from 23.56% to 22.93%. Structured Settlements also increased, but only from one Reddit citation event and one citing response in July, so its percentage change is not a stable strategic signal.

Gold IRAs and Precious Metals Dealers was nearly flat on event share, moving from 4.10% to 4.09%, while response coverage fell 27.4%. This is another example of why event share and response coverage should be reported separately.

The platform-specific conclusion is therefore not that every vertical declined on every metric. It is that Reddit visibility weakened across most financial topics: 9 of 11 verticals declined in event share and 9 of 11 declined in response coverage.

What Appeared When Reddit Disappeared?

Questions This Section Answers

• Did one source consistently replace Reddit?
• Which domains appeared most often in Reddit-loss scenarios?
• Does the evidence support a single replacement-source strategy?

No single source replaced Reddit across the 82 fresh-reconstruction scenarios where Reddit appeared in July but not September.

YouTube and Money.com were the most common newly appearing domains, each present in 24.4% of the 82 fresh-reconstruction Reddit-loss scenarios. Investopedia appeared in 23.2%, Forbes in 22.0%, and Yahoo in 20.7%.

The replacement mix spans broad financial publishers, video, search-owned sources, investment specialists, and crypto-specific sources. That pattern supports source redistribution, not a one-for-one substitution.

For a brand, the practical implication is that replacing a Reddit strategy with one publisher target would be too narrow. The more defensible approach is to identify which source classes gain visibility inside each high-value prompt cluster.

Platform Differences: Google AI Mode Declined Much Less Than ChatGPT and Perplexity

Questions This Section Answers

• Was the Reddit decline similar across AI platforms?
• How did Google AI Mode compare with ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity?
• Why should financial teams report source visibility by platform? The parent financial study shows large platform differences:

Google AI Mode declined by about one quarter on event share, compared with roughly three quarters in ChatGPT and nearly nine tenths in Perplexity.

The matched tests show the same platform divergence. Google AI Mode had 79 losses vs. 25 gains, compared with 38 vs. 4 in ChatGPT, 60 vs. 22 in Google AI Overviews, and 16 vs. 0 in Perplexity.

A single blended Reddit visibility KPI would obscure those differences. Financial brands, publishers, mortgage companies, exchanges, advisers and investment platforms should treat platform as a first-class reporting dimension.

What This Means for Financial Brands and CMOs

Questions This Section Answers

• Should financial brands stop investing in Reddit?
• What should replace a single-source authority strategy?
• Which metrics should CMOs track next?

1. Do not treat Reddit as a fixed AI citation channel

Reddit remained a major Google AI Mode source, but both its event share and response coverage declined. Source visibility should be treated as dynamic.

2. Track platform-specific exposure

Google AI Mode was much more stable than ChatGPT or Perplexity. Blended reporting can hide a severe loss on one platform behind relative stability on another.

3. Build a portfolio of third-party authority

The Reddit-loss scenarios redistributed across Google, Money.com, Investopedia, YouTube, Yahoo, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, crypto specialists and first-party platforms. That argues for diversified earned authority rather than one replacement target.

4. Separate citations from recommendations

Visible citation does not prove recommendation causality. Track citations, brand mentions, recommendation frequency, sentiment, comparison placement and company-owned content visibility as separate measures.

5. Manage at the prompt-cluster level

Robo-Advisors, Reverse Mortgage, Annuities and Crypto Wallets changed at different rates. Budget and editorial strategy should map to the commercial questions that matter most to the business rather than to one category-wide average.

What This Means for Financial Publishers

Reddit's decline creates opportunity, but not automatic transfer.

A publisher can use this research to identify where Google AI Mode is changing its source mix and where editorial, research, comparison, educational or specialist content may have room to gain visibility. The source-change data does not imply that any one content format guarantees citation.

For publishers selling advertising, research, sponsorship or data partnerships, a defensible commercial story can focus on:

• which financial verticals cite the publisher;
• which high-intent prompt clusters produce citations;
• how visibility changes month to month;
• whether the publisher appears in Reddit-loss scenarios;
• whether visibility persists across Google AI Mode, AI Mode, ChatGPT and other engines; and
• whether company mentions and recommendations move alongside source visibility.

The defensible claim is measured citation visibility, not "AI trusts us" or "our citation caused the recommendation."

How This Study Relates to Prior Reddit and Financial AI Research

Independent research is directionally consistent with a gradual Reddit decline in Google AI Mode, but the exact percentages are not directly comparable.

PromptWatch measured Reddit's share of Google AI Mode citations moving from about 2.22% in early July to 1.54% in mid-August 2026, a 30.5% relative decline. It described the movement as gradual rather than the abrupt break it observed in ChatGPT. Article 50 shows the same gradual direction over a different population and longer window: full-panel Reddit event share moved 5.08% to 4.75% to 3.87%, while the locked endpoint declined 22.9%. The magnitudes should not be merged because the prompt populations, dates, denominators and collection systems differ.

Ahrefs' September 2026 broad U.S. Google AI Mode leaderboard ranked Reddit #1 at 17.9% mention share, narrowly ahead of YouTube at 17.8%. That broad all-topic prominence can coexist with Reddit ranking #3 at 20.1% response coverage across this three-month financial source study and #5 at 17.42% coverage in September. Ahrefs uses a broad U.S. all-topic query universe and a mention-share denominator, while Article 50 uses high-stakes investing, retirement, mortgage and financial prompts and reports response citation coverage plus citation-event share.

Tinuiti's Q3 2026 citation research reports more than 13x growth in google.com's share of AI Mode citations during 2026 and increasing use of Google-owned surfaces such as Google Business Profiles and product cards. It also reports that most tracked AI platforms were at or near Q3 highs in broader social citation share, with Perplexity as a notable exception. Those broader source-category movements can coexist with a Reddit-specific decline because the source categories and denominators are different.

Taken together, the outside research strengthens the case for measurement discipline, not a universal Reddit narrative. The defensible comparison is direction, platform specificity, population and methodology, not decimal-point equivalence across unrelated panels.

How This Study Is Different

This study narrows the broader Reddit trend research to one platform, one high-stakes commercial family, and one fixed three-month window.

It combines:

1. a 3,715-response published Google AI Mode financial source slice;
2. a locked July-to-September Google AI Mode endpoint;
3. a 440-scenario locked matched prompt-plus-surface test;
4. both citation-event share and response citation coverage;
5. a fresh 11-vertical platform-specific audit from the frozen source corpus; and
6. a matched Reddit-loss source redistribution audit.

The question is narrow and commercial: how stable was Reddit as a directly cited source in Google AI Mode for consequential financial consumer decisions during this quarter?

Why AI Citation Studies Can Disagree

Two studies can report different Reddit trends without either one necessarily being wrong.

Query population

Mortgage, investing, retirement and crypto questions are not representative of the entire web. Reddit's role can differ in software, travel, entertainment, troubleshooting or general informational queries.

Platform surface

Google AI Mode can behave differently from Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot.

Denominator

Citation-event share and response citation coverage measure different things. A source can lose event share while coverage moves less, or vice versa.

Time window

A short product change and a three-month endpoint comparison answer different questions.

Prompt weighting

This study does not weight prompts by search volume, media spend, assets under management, loan value, conversion probability or revenue.

Matching contract

The locked parent matched panel contains 440 Google AI Mode scenarios, with 103 both, 79 losses, 25 gains, and 233 neither. The later record-level child reconstruction yields 448 unambiguous pairs, with 82 losses and 25 gains, under the newer child-study implementation. This article uses the published parent panel for cross-series comparison and labels the 448-pair reconstruction separately for the vertical and replacement-source audits.

Domain and infrastructure handling

Domains are consolidated at the registrable-domain level and known technical endpoints are excluded from publisher-level analysis. A small difference in how missing-URL records are handled can alter event counts without materially changing direction.

The useful conclusion is not that one universal Reddit citation percentage exists. Citation visibility is conditional on platform, category, prompt set, time period, denominator and collection method.

Verticals Covered

The Google AI Mode financial study covers all 11 family verticals:

• Annuities
• Crypto Exchanges
• Crypto Wallets
• Gold IRAs and Precious Metals Dealers
• Mortgage
• Mortgage Refinance Lenders
• Online Financial Advisors
• Online Stock Brokers
• Reverse Mortgage
• Robo-Advisors
• Structured Settlements

All 11 were present at both July and September endpoints.

Methodology

Source archive

This study uses the frozen July-September 2026 LLM Authority Index archive underlying the financial citation-source study and the parent financial Reddit decline study.

Eligibility

A record is eligible when it is:

• in July, August or September 2026;
• assigned to the Google AI Mode platform family;
• associated with the Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Decisions family; and
• not explicitly marked as an extraction failure.

Exact-repeat anti-double-counting

An observation is treated as an exact analytical repeat when all of the following match:

• report month;
• exact raw platform/source surface;
• normalized prompt text; and
• exact set of original citation URLs.

One analytical record is retained while source-dataset memberships are preserved for vertical analysis.

Prompt normalization

Prompt text is normalized with Unicode NFKC normalization, case folding, whitespace collapse and trimming.

Domain normalization

Citation URLs are parsed to hostname, lowercased, stripped of a leading www., and consolidated to registrable domain using Public Suffix List logic.

Infrastructure exclusions

Known technical or navigation endpoints are excluded from public publisher analysis. For Google AI Mode, records with a usable publisher root domain can still contribute to domain-level analysis even when the exported URL is missing.

Reddit identification

Reddit is identified at the registrable-domain level as reddit.com.

Citation-event share

Reddit citation-event share = Reddit citation events / all eligible public citation events

A response can contribute more than one Reddit citation event if multiple eligible Reddit URLs appear.

Response citation coverage

Reddit response citation coverage = eligible responses citing Reddit at least once / all eligible responses

Reddit counts no more than once per response for this metric.

Locked endpoint

The headline Google AI Mode endpoint figures are preserved from Article 29, the parent financial Reddit trend study.

Locked matched prompt-plus-surface test

The headline matched panel is also inherited from Article 29. It contains 440 scenarios, with 103 both, 79 losses, 25 gains, and 233 neither.

Vertical audit

The vertical table is recalculated directly from the frozen record-level corpus under the newer child-study implementation. It is reported separately from the locked parent endpoint.

Replacement-source audit

For matched scenarios where Reddit appeared in July but not September, the analysis identifies registrable domains present in September but absent from the paired July citation set. Newly appearing domains can co-occur, so the table is not a mutually exclusive attribution model.

Limitations

1. The study covers one frozen three-month research window and should not be treated as a permanent platform rule.
2. Prompt sets are research panels, not search-volume-weighted market-share samples.
3. Visible citation does not prove recommendation causality, hidden retrieval influence or training-data use.
4. The study measures captured public-facing sources and cannot observe every internal retrieval step.
5. Vertical labels are source dataset labels and are not necessarily statistically independent markets.
6. Some small verticals have limited endpoint Reddit counts, which can make relative percentage changes volatile.
7. The parent matched panel and later child reconstruction use slightly different matching implementations. The published parent denominator is retained for cross-series consistency.
8. Newly appearing September domains are descriptive co-occurrences, not proven substitutes for Reddit.
9. Platform behavior can change after the research window.

Commercial Disclosure

LLM Authority Index is affiliated with CiteWorks Studio and related AI-search research and services. This research is designed to document observed AI citation behavior. Commercial relationships do not alter the frozen source corpus, eligibility rules, matching logic or published denominators.

No company can purchase a ranking, recommendation, score or position in this study. Citation visibility should not be interpreted as an endorsement by LLM Authority Index or by the AI platform being measured.

References

1. LLM Authority Index. The 2026 AI Citation Authority Study: Which Websites Does AI Cite for High-Stakes Decisions? https://llmauthorityindex.com/resources/research/2026-ai-citation-authority-study-high-stakes-consumer-decisions
2. LLM Authority Index. The Most-Cited Websites in AI for High-Stakes Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Consumer Decisions. https://llmauthorityindex.com/resources/research/most-cited-websites-ai-investing-retirement-mortgage-financial-high-stakes-consumer-decisions
3. LLM Authority Index. Reddit's Decline in AI Citations for High-Stakes Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Consumer Decisions. https://llmauthorityindex.com/resources/research/reddit-ai-citation-decline-investing-retirement-mortgage-financial-high-stakes-consumer-decisions
4. LLM Authority Index. The 100 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Mode for High-Stakes Investing, Retirement, Mortgage and Financial Consumer Decisions. https://llmauthorityindex.com/resources/research/top-100-google-ai-mode-citations-investing-retirement-mortgage-financial-high-stakes-consumer-decisions
5. LLM Authority Index. The Persistence-Portability Gap: Why AI Citation Authority Persists Over Time but Fragments Across Platforms. https://llmauthorityindex.com/resources/measurement/persistence-portability-gap
6. PromptWatch. Why Did ChatGPT Stop Citing Reddit? Inside the August 2026 Citation Collapse. https://promptwatch.com/blog/chatgpt-stop-citing-reddit
7. Ahrefs. The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Mode (September 2026). https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-ai-mode/
8. Tinuiti. AI Citation Trends Report Q3 2026. https://tinuiti.com/research-insights/research/ai-citation-trends-report/

Related LLM Authority Index Research

Corpus foundation and measurement framework

• 2026 AI Citation Authority Study
• Overall Reddit Citation Decline Study
• Cross-Platform Citation Overlap Study
• AI Citation Drift Study
• Overall Google AI Mode Top 100 Study
• Persistence-Portability Gap Framework

Investing, retirement, mortgage and financial source-market branch

• All-Platform Financial Citation Authority Study
• Google AI Overviews Financial Citation Sources
• Google AI Mode Financial Citation Sources
• ChatGPT Financial Citation Sources
• Perplexity Financial Citation Sources
• Gemini Financial Citation Sources
• Microsoft Copilot Financial Citation Sources

Financial Reddit-trend branch

• Financial Reddit Decline Parent Study
• Google AI Overviews Reddit Trend
• Google AI Mode Reddit Trend
• ChatGPT Reddit Trend
• Perplexity Reddit Trend
• Gemini Reddit Trend
• Microsoft Copilot Reddit Trend