Data study
"Google brought me here" is down 31% on Reddit. "ChatGPT sent me here" quadrupled
We found every Reddit comment where someone says how they got to the thread, "Google brought me here" or "ChatGPT sent me here", and looked at how the two changed and which threads people land in.
By KissMyPost ResearchPublished Data through September 202610 min read
Short answer
Reddit comments where the writer says a search engine brought them to the thread fell from 3,190 in the first quarter of 2025 to 2,214 in the third quarter of 2026, 31% lower, while Reddit as a whole had 14% more comments. Comments that credit ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI assistant grew from 26 to 103 over the same time (quadrupled), and are now about 1 in 22 of these "how I got here" comments. The threads search sends people to are small and old: median 5 upvotes, against 52 for the thread of a typical comment, and 41% over a year old. AI sends people to newer threads, median 71 days old. These are self-reports, so they show direction, not traffic volume.
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What we counted
Some people tell you how they found a Reddit thread. "Google brought me here." "Found this post while googling the same error." "ChatGPT sent me here." We collected every comment like that from Q3 2023 to Q3 2026: 35,501 that credit a search engine and 488 that credit an AI assistant, in 34,463 threads.
A comment counts only if it says the search or the AI led to this thread, post or subreddit. "I found this on Google" about some piece of information doesn't count. Known bots are left out. Most visitors never comment, so these numbers show which way things are going and what kind of threads people land in, not how much traffic Reddit gets.
"Google brought me here" is down 31% from its peak
These comments grew from 1,908 in the third quarter of 2023 to 3,190 in the first quarter of 2025, 67% more. Since then they've gone down, to 2,214 in the third quarter of 2026: 31% below the peak.
Reddit itself didn't shrink. It had 14% more comments in Q3 2026 than in Q1 2025, so per million Reddit comments the drop is steeper: from 3.32 to 2.01, 39% lower. People who arrive from search mostly write in older threads, so we also checked against comments in threads at least six months old. By that measure the fall is 21%.
Google is almost all of it: 99% of these comments from January 2025 to September 2026 name Google or "googling". Bing and DuckDuckGo together come up 10 times, and the rest just say "searching".
Known bots left out. Source: public Reddit archives plus our own collection for recent months. Analysis: KissMyPost.
"ChatGPT sent me here" quadrupled
The first comment in our archive that credits an AI assistant is from December 2022, the month after ChatGPT came out. For almost two years they stayed rare: 14 in the fourth quarter of 2024. Then they took off, from 26 in the first quarter of 2025 to 103 in the third quarter of 2026. AI went from 0.8% of all these "how I got here" comments to 4.5%, about 1 in 22.
It's still small next to search. In Q3 2026, for every comment that credits an AI assistant, 21 credit a search engine. ChatGPT is named in 323 of the 453 AI comments from January 2025 to September 2026. Gemini is second with 60, and 34 of those came in the last two quarters. Marketers have noticed the shift: Reddit talk about "brand mentions", most of it about AI answers, grew several times over in the past year.
Known bots left out. Source: public Reddit archives plus our own collection for recent months. Analysis: KissMyPost.
| AI assistant | Comments | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 323 | 71% |
| Gemini | 60 | 13% |
| Grok | 20 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 15 | 3% |
| Claude | 6 | 1% |
| Copilot | 3 | 1% |
| Other ("an AI", "AI Overview", "AI Mode") | 26 | 6% |
Each assistant counts only after its public launch.
Search sends people to small, old threads, often questions
To see what these threads look like, we compared them with the thread an ordinary Reddit comment is written in. From January 2025 to September 2026, the typical Reddit comment sits in a thread with 52 upvotes. The typical "Google brought me here" comment sits in a thread with 5. Of these threads, 59% have under 10 upvotes, against 30% for comments in general, and only 2.5% have 1,000 or more.
They're old, too. 41% of the threads were more than a year old when the visitor arrived and 16% more than three years. Across Reddit, only 0.6% of all comments go into threads over a year old. 44% of the threads have a question mark in the title (30% for comments in general), and 75% are text posts rather than links, images or videos (40%).
In other words, the Reddit thread that keeps bringing people in from search usually isn't a hit. It's a small thread about one specific question or problem.
| Any comment | From search | From AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median upvotes | 52 | 5 | 4 |
| Under 10 upvotes | 30% | 59% | 65% |
| 1,000+ upvotes | 13.9% | 2.5% | 2.9% |
| Median comments | 40 | 11 | 7 |
| Over a year old | 0.6% | 41% | 30% |
| Question mark in title | 30% | 44% | 29% |
| Text post | 40% | 75% | 77% |
Thread of each comment. "Any comment" is a random sample of 699,061 comments from the same months; the "over a year old" share uses all 7,001,904,418 of them. Thread age is counted at the time of the comment.
AI sends people to newer threads
The threads AI assistants point to are small too: median 4 upvotes, 65% under 10. But they're much younger. When someone arrives from an AI assistant, the median thread is 71 days old, against 216 days from search, and 34% are less than a week old (16% from search). By assistant, the median is 93 days for ChatGPT and 27 for Gemini.
AI also sends a lot of people to "identify this" subreddits. About 1 in 9 AI arrivals land in places like r/tipofmyjoystick, r/NameThatSong, r/tipofmytongue and r/whatsthatbook, against 1 in 83 from search. These are the subreddits where people describe a half-remembered game, song or book and others try to name it.
Where people arrive from search
Search arrivals are spread thin: from January 2025 to September 2026 they came in 7,847 different subreddits, and the busiest, r/buildapc, has 92 of 19,312. r/buildapc, r/movies and r/techsupport lead, followed by r/SteamDeck and r/ios. The subreddit CSV has every subreddit with at least 5 search arrivals or 2 AI arrivals.
| Subreddit | Comments |
|---|---|
| r/buildapc | 92 |
| r/movies | 86 |
| r/techsupport | 77 |
| r/SteamDeck | 68 |
| r/ios | 66 |
| r/iphone | 63 |
| r/Music | 56 |
| r/CatAdvice | 56 |
| r/facebook | 55 |
| r/DoesAnybodyElse | 54 |
| r/SkincareAddiction | 54 |
| r/kingdomcome | 50 |
| r/NameThatSong | 50 |
| r/NoStupidQuestions | 48 |
| r/CPTSD | 46 |
Personal profiles left out.
Every quarter
| Quarter | From search | From AI | AI share | Search per million Reddit comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2026 | 2,214 | 103 | 4.5% | 2.01 |
| Q2 2026 | 2,644 | 59 | 2.2% | 2.55 |
| Q1 2026 | 2,721 | 75 | 2.7% | 2.72 |
| Q4 2025 | 2,720 | 67 | 2.4% | 2.84 |
| Q3 2025 | 2,837 | 80 | 2.7% | 2.87 |
| Q2 2025 | 2,986 | 43 | 1.4% | 3.12 |
| Q1 2025 | 3,190 | 26 | 0.8% | 3.32 |
| Q4 2024 | 3,170 | 14 | 0.4% | 3.50 |
| Q3 2024 | 3,074 | 7 | 0.2% | 3.48 |
| Q2 2024 | 2,829 | 4 | 0.1% | 3.46 |
| Q1 2024 | 2,826 | 6 | 0.2% | 3.39 |
| Q4 2023 | 2,382 | 3 | 0.1% | 3.09 |
| Q3 2023 | 1,908 | 1 | 0.1% | 2.50 |
What this data can't tell you
- How much traffic Reddit gets from Google or AI. Only a small, unknown share of visitors leave a comment, let alone say how they got there.
- Why the search number fell. Fewer people arriving, Google showing Reddit less often, answers at the top of search results, or visitors simply commenting less would all look the same in this count.
- Every way of saying it. We count a fixed list of English phrases. Other wordings and other languages are missed, so the totals are a floor.
- Whether every match is right. Two independent checks found 97 real search arrivals in 100 random matches and 96 real AI arrivals in 100.
- The rest of 2026. Our data ends in September 2026.
Method
Finding the comments
We scanned every Reddit comment in our archive from January 2021 to September 2026 with a broad pattern, then kept only comments that match a strict list of phrases in full: a search engine or AI assistant "brought", "sent", "led", "pointed" or "took" me here or to this thread; I "found this thread" or post or subreddit on, via or through one; I "came here", "got here" or "ended up here" from one; this thread "came up" or "showed up" when I searched or googled; or an assistant "cited", "linked" or "recommended" this thread or post.
An assistant counts only from the day it launched publicly (ChatGPT on November 30, 2022; Gemini on December 6, 2023), so "Gemini" the crypto exchange or someone named Claude in 2021 isn't counted as AI. Names must be whole words, so "an AI" doesn't match "an AITA post". Comments by accounts on our list of known bots are left out.
Checks
Two AI labelers (Claude Haiku) each read 100 random search matches and 100 random AI matches from January 2025 to September 2026 and judged whether each writer really says they arrived that way. On search they agreed on 98 of 100; after we read the disagreements, 97 were real. On AI they agreed on all 100 and 96 were real. The misses were things like a search inside Reddit or advice to "anyone who came here from Google". An earlier, broader phrase list was right only about half the time on AI matches, because people write "I found this on ChatGPT" about information, so we dropped it.
Quarters and comparisons
Each comment goes into a quarter by its creation time in UTC. The series starts in July 2023: in June 2023 thousands of subreddits went dark in a protest over Reddit's changes for third-party apps, which makes that quarter hard to compare. "Per million Reddit comments" divides by every comment in our archive for the quarter. "Threads at least six months old" counts comments written in threads that were posted at least six months before the start of the month.
What the threads look like
For each comment we took its thread's upvotes, number of comments, title and type as stored in our archive. Threads posted between July 10 and October 31, 2023 are left out of the upvote numbers, because the archived vote counts for those weeks are frozen. The comparison, "any Reddit comment", is a random 1 in 10,000 of all comments from January 2025 to September 2026 with the same fields; its share of comments in threads over a year old counts every comment and treats a thread as over a year old if it was posted before the start of the same month a year earlier.
Source
Public Reddit archives back to 2005, plus our own collection for recent months. All counts come from queries run on October 24 and 25, 2026. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we'll fix it here with a dated note.
Questions people ask
Does Google still send people to Reddit threads?
Yes, far more than AI does. In Q3 2026, 2,214 Reddit comments said a search engine brought the writer to the thread, against 103 that credited an AI assistant. But the search number is 31% below its peak of 3,190 in Q1 2025, while Reddit had 14% more comments overall.
Does ChatGPT send traffic to Reddit?
People increasingly say it does. Comments like "ChatGPT sent me here" grew from 26 in Q1 2025 to 103 in Q3 2026, and ChatGPT is named in 323 of 453 such comments since January 2025, with Gemini second. This counts people who say so in a comment, not visits.
What kind of Reddit threads get visitors from Google?
Mostly small, old questions. From January 2025 to September 2026, the median thread people said Google sent them to had 5 upvotes, against 52 for the thread of a typical Reddit comment. 41% were over a year old when the visitor arrived, and 44% had a question mark in the title.
Which Reddit threads does ChatGPT send people to?
Small ones, and newer than Google's: the median thread was 71 days old when the visitor arrived, against 216 from search, and 34% were under a week old. About 1 in 9 land in "identify this" subreddits such as r/tipofmyjoystick and r/tipofmytongue.
Why are there fewer "Google brought me here" comments?
This data shows when it happened, not why. Fewer people arriving from Google, Google showing Reddit less often, answers at the top of search results, or visitors commenting less would all lower this count in the same way.
Can I use this data?
Yes. The CSV files and the charts are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit KissMyPost and link to this page.
The data
The quarterly, monthly and per-subreddit counts behind this article are in these files. They're free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please credit KissMyPost and link to this page.
- CSVQuarterly counts, Q3 2023 to Q3 2026Comments crediting search and AI per quarter, the AI share, all Reddit comments, counts per million comments and per comments in older threads, and AI comments by assistant.
- CSVMonthly countsComments crediting search and AI per month, July 2023 to September 2026, with all Reddit comments in each month.
- CSVCounts by subreddit, January 2025 to September 2026All 852 subreddits with at least 5 search arrivals or 2 AI arrivals. Personal profiles left out.
- PNGMain chart, 1600 × 1000The search chart on this page as an image.
This study comes from the archive behind KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. Its search shows where any phrase of up to three words came up in Reddit posts and comments back to 2005, so you can find the small, specific threads in your niche that people keep landing on. More studies like this one are in KissMyPost Research.
Check your own subreddit
See when your subreddit is most active, what gets posts removed and what its readers talk about.
Cite this study
KissMyPost Research (2026). "Google brought me here" is down 31% on Reddit. "ChatGPT sent me here" quadrupled. KissMyPost. https://kissmypost.com/research/google-brought-me-here-reddit