We show the threads, you take part
See which Reddit threads the engines cite, then answer them yourself
Reddit is a real citation source for some engines and close to irrelevant for others. No vendor can post your way into it, so we show you the threads the engines cite and you answer them.
Every plan queries all 5. See how each engine picks who it names
Published measurement
of the times OpenAI's search supplied Reddit as a candidate source, the model went on to cite it: 3,012 citations from 491,024 candidates (Dan Petrovic, July 2026). Retrieved constantly, chosen almost never.
The gap this closes
- Reddit advice treats every engine the same, and the engines do not behave the same.
- Founders guess which subreddits matter and post where the name sounds right.
- A vendor-written reply posted by a client is the thing communities are built to remove.
- Until now there has been no record of whether a thread was ever cited for your buying queries.
What you end up with
- The threads the engines actually cited for your queries, when Reddit is a top source.
- A clear signal when it is not, so you spend the month somewhere that is read.
- Participation guidance that keeps a reply citable and keeps your account in good standing.
- Stated plainly: we do not write or post Reddit content for you.
How it works
We find the threads. You do the part only a real account can do.
The scan records what the engines cited
Every scan asks your buying queries on all five engines and stores the sources each answer cited. The Sources pane lists the ten domains cited most, with the cited URLs under each.
If reddit.com is a top source, you see the threads
A Reddit thread appears with its subreddit in the path only when reddit.com is among that scan's ten most cited domains. When it is not there, that is the answer too: for your queries, on that scan, the engines went elsewhere.
You answer from a real account
Taking part is yours to do, from your own account. Pick the one thread that asks the query you are losing and answer it the way the rules below describe. The next scan re-asks the same queries, so you can read whether the answer changed.
What you get on each plan
Every plan gets the same Sources pane. No plan drafts or posts Reddit content: we deleted that in August, for the reasons further down.
Track
Free- The ten domains the engines cited most for your queries
- When reddit.com is one of them, the cited thread URLs under it
- Two URLs shown per domain, the rest one click away
- The buying queries those answers were for
- Your Tofu Index across every engine
Fix
$99/mo- Weekly scans, so a newly cited thread shows up within the week
- The Bofu Index, from head-to-head comparisons with your rivals
- Drafted pages on your own site that a good reply can point to
- Alerts when a query you used to win goes to a rival
Dominate
$499/mo- A wider query budget, so more answers and more cited sources
- Head-to-head detail: which rival is named where
- More cited threads to choose from, scanned weekly
Rule
$1999/mo- Dominate's numbers, with our team doing the work
- We pick the threads worth answering
- A real person on your side still posts
No plan writes or posts Reddit content. Rule carries Dominate's numbers with our team doing the reading, and is sales-assisted.
Which engine actually leans on this
Your row is Reddit and forums. The rest of the grid is on the engines page.
| Channel | ChatGPT | Claude | Perplexity | Gemini | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your own site Schema, answer pages, llms.txt, crawlability | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Measured | Heavy Our read | Heavy Vendor |
| Reviews and directories G2, Clutch, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google Business | Moderate Our read | Light Measured | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Moderate Measured |
| Reddit and forums Unpaid opinion, where buyers go for the unvarnished view | Light Our read | Light Measured | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Measured |
| Video YouTube. Only counts once there is a transcript | Moderate Our read | Light Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Our read | Heavy Measured |
| Newsletters LinkedIn, Substack, Beehiiv. Published under a named person | Moderate Our read | Light Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Our read | Heavy Measured |
| News and PR Earned coverage, wire pickup, journalist mentions | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Moderate Our read |
Your own site. Your own site counts most for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode.
Reviews and directories. Reviews and directories counts most for Perplexity. It is a light signal for Claude.
Reddit and forums. Reddit and forums counts most for Perplexity, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for ChatGPT, Claude.
Video. Video counts most for Gemini, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for Claude.
Newsletters. Newsletters counts most for Gemini, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for Claude.
News and PR. News and PR counts most for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity.
Where this comes from
- OpenAI: publishers and developers FAQ States that a site must allow OAI-SearchBot to be eligible for ChatGPT search at all.
- OpenAI: introducing ChatGPT search The named publisher partnerships behind the news and PR row.
- Anthropic: web search tool documentation Citations are always enabled. Left to itself Claude decides when to search; our scans force the search on every query.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website AI Overviews and AI Mode report inside the ordinary Search Console Performance report.
- Search Console Help: impressions, position and clicks How AI Mode counts a click, and why a follow-up question is treated as a new query.
- Dan Petrovic: citation mining of OpenAI grounding metadata Reddit retrieved in 76 percent of OpenAI searches and selected 0.61 percent of the time.
- Our production scan database, read 12 August 2026 46 completed reports, 34 brands, 419 buying queries, 2,421 answered buying cells. Where the per-engine mention rates come from.
- Our 15-region managed services study 743 records, 566 named by an engine, and the per-engine corroboration rates.
- What our crawler finds on real sites 39 readable crawls: 38 with no llms.txt, 26 with no FAQ schema, 16 with no Organization schema.
- How we check an AI visibility report The method behind every first-party number on this page, including what it cannot show.
Engine behaviour moves month to month. This table is maintained, not published once.
The proof, including the parts that flatter nobody
The selection-rate figures on this page are Dan Petrovic's, published with his method and raw counts. We cite them because they are the only published numbers that separate retrieving Reddit from citing it.
Our own starting line is the scan corpus. Across the 46 completed reports behind this page, Perplexity named the brand in 7.4% of the buying queries we put to it, on firms that arrived already suspecting they were missing.
Every other engine sat between 0.4% and 4.0%, on the same firms that suspected they were missing.
What we cannot do is attribute a citation to a reply. We do not instrument Reddit. We can show the query your reply answered, re-asked on all five engines every scan, with the cited sources stored so you can read whether the thread is still among them.
Read the MSP AI Visibility Report 2026 →A worked example: from the Sources pane to one reply
The shape of one scan's Sources pane for a managed IT firm that kept losing an after-hours coverage query. The firm, the threads and the counts are illustrative. The reply underneath was written by the founder, following the rules above.
Sources pane, top cited domains (illustrative)
| Cited domain | Cited in | URLs shown |
|---|---|---|
| clutch.co | 9 answers | Two directory category pages |
| reddit.com | 6 answers | r/sysadmin thread on 2am coverage; r/msp thread on response windows |
| vendor-a.com | 5 answers | Their after-hours service page; their pricing page |
| g2.com | 3 answers | A category comparison page |
The founder's reply in the r/sysadmin thread
Disclosure: I run an MSP, so read this as an interested opinion. We cover four plants, and this is what I would check before signing with anyone, including us. Ask who picks up at 2am. A person, by name, not a team. Get the response window in the contract, and the consequence of missing it in the same clause. Ask how many after-hours incidents they closed last quarter without waking your own staff. Most have never been asked. For a two-shift plant, insist on a written handover at shift change. That is where the failures happen, not at 2am.
Why this reply is allowed to exist
- The disclosure comes before any advice.
- It is useful with the firm's name removed, which is the test.
- There is no link, because a link would help nobody who asked.
- Every check is specific enough for a reader to test.
The pane told the founder which thread an engine had already quoted to buyers. The founder decided it was worth fifteen minutes and wrote the reply. The next scan re-asks the same query, and the stored answers show whether anything changed.
How it actually works
The mechanism, for anyone who wants it. Open a card to read the detail.
Which engines read Reddit, and which do not
Every engine we query searches the live web before it answers, so any of them can retrieve a Reddit thread. Retrieving is not citing.
Read the detail
Petrovic mined OpenAI's grounding metadata, which exposes the candidates a model rejected as well as the ones it used:
- Reddit was supplied as a candidate 491,024 times and cited 3,012 times.
- Present in 76% of searches, chosen 0.61% of the time it appeared.
- The same study puts Reddit at about 2% of Google's cited sources, and at zero across Anthropic's.
So treat Reddit as a Google channel first:
- Our Google engine is Google AI Mode. That is where a ranking thread has the best chance of being quoted to your buyer.
- ChatGPT reads Reddit constantly and rarely chooses it.
- Claude, in that data, did not choose it once.
None of that makes the work pointless. It decides where the hours go. If your buyers ask Google, a thread that keeps ranking is one of the few assets money cannot buy. If they ask Claude, the same hours belong on your own pages and on the review platforms your category is judged on.
What the Sources pane shows, and what it does not
Each scan lists the ten domains the engines cited most across your buying queries. Since September it stores the full cited URL, not just the bare domain.
Read the detail
- Under each domain you see two URLs, and can open the rest with a click.
- For Reddit, that means the thread itself, with the subreddit in the path.
Read the bound carefully, because it is the whole promise. A thread appears only when reddit.com is among that scan's top ten cited domains.
- We do not monitor Reddit.
- We do not run a subreddit report.
- We do not send you a feed of threads that mention your category.
- We show you what the engines cited when they answered your buyers' queries, and nothing beyond that.
That narrowness is the value. A tool that lists every thread mentioning your category hands you a reading list. A list of the threads an engine actually quoted to a buyer, on a query you lost, hands you a target.
How to answer a thread so it stays citable
Disclose first. Say who you are and what you sell in the first line, before any advice. A disclosed expert is welcome almost everywhere; an undisclosed one breaks most communities' rules and loses the trust of every reader who finds out.
Read the detail
- Answer before you mention. If the reply is useful with your firm's name removed, the name may stay. If removing it makes the reply pointless, it was an advertisement, and moderators and engines weighing the thread's independence will treat it as one.
- Be specific enough to be wrong. A reply with a number, a named step and a stated condition is something a reader can test and an engine can quote. A reply made of adjectives is neither.
- Keep the volume low. One useful answer in a thread people keep finding is worth more than twenty thin ones. A burst of comments from a new account reads as exactly what it is.
- Respect each community's rules, which vary more than people expect. Some ban vendor participation outright. In those, answer with expertise and no link at all, and let the standing do the work.
Why we stopped drafting Reddit replies
Until August the Content Engine drafted a Reddit reply for every scan. We deleted it.
Read the detail
- A thread is valuable to an engine because it carries several independent opinions from people with nothing to sell. A vendor-drafted reply pasted in by a client subtracts from that independence.
- It also sat outside what the product is for. The Content Engine drafts things that get you cited: pages on your own domain, video scripts, newsletter issues.
- A social reply drafted for engagement is a different job. Doing it badly at scale is how accounts get banned.
So the work splits cleanly. We tell you which threads the engines cited and what the losing answer said. You decide whether a thread deserves your time, and you write the reply in your own words.
See where you stand first
Run a free scan and find out which of these gaps you actually have.
Get your free auditFrequently asked questions
Do you post on Reddit for me?
No, and no plan does. Posting stays with a real person on your side, from an account with real history. A contribution from a borrowed or brand-new account is the fastest way to have it removed.
Do you draft Reddit replies?
Not any more. The Content Engine drafted a Reddit reply per scan until August 2026 and we removed it, because a vendor-drafted reply undermines the independence that makes a thread worth citing. We show you which threads the engines cited; you write the reply.
Will TofuBofu show me every subreddit discussing my category?
No. The Sources pane lists the ten domains the engines cited most for your buying queries, with the cited URLs under each. A Reddit thread appears only when reddit.com is among those ten on that scan. We do not monitor Reddit or send a feed of mentions.
Does Reddit matter for AI answers?
For some engines. In Dan Petrovic's published data Reddit is about 2% of Google's cited sources, second only to YouTube, and zero across Anthropic's grounding sources. OpenAI cited it in 0.61% of the times it retrieved it. Treat it as a Google channel first, and let your own Sources pane settle it for your category.
Is marketing on Reddit against the rules?
Undisclosed promotion is, and it gets removed. Disclosed expertise that answers the question is welcome in most communities. Disclose in the first line and write a reply that is useful with your firm's name removed.
How long before a reply does anything?
Longer than the on-site work, and it lasts longer. Threads persist and keep being read. Run it beside the pages on your own domain, never instead of them.
Sources and further reading
- Dan Petrovic, citation mining of OpenAI grounding metadata: OpenAI supplied Reddit as a candidate source 491,024 times and cited it 3,012 times, a 0.61% selection rate at a 76% presence rate. Reddit is about 2% of Google's cited sources and zero across 139,601 Anthropic grounding sources.
- G2 2026 AI Search Insight Report: 51% of B2B software buyers begin research on an AI chatbot more often than Google; 69% chose a different vendor than planned based on AI guidance.
- Lewis et al. 2020, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (arXiv:2005.11401): The foundational paper describing how models retrieve from an external, non-parametric memory to generate factual, sourced answers.
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