Reddit

The direct answer: For most of 2026, user-generated content — Reddit threads above all — has been one of the single biggest inputs into AI travel recommendations. Reddit and Wikipedia together accounted for more than 25% of all ChatGPT citations in the U.S. (Reddit alone: 11.97%) across roughly 600,000 citation events measured in early 2026 (5W Research via Similarweb, May 2026). 9 in 10 Reddit users surveyed said they researched travel products or brands on the platform before booking (Reddit for Business, August 2026). Then, in the second week of August 2026, ChatGPT cut its Reddit citations by at least 73% overnight — across all 16 brand reports OtterlyAI tracks, while its overall citation volume rose 3.5% (OtterlyAI, September 2026). The gap was filled by reference sources and official brand pages, not by other forums. The lesson for hotels and tour operators is not “Reddit stopped mattering” — Perplexity and Google still cite it heavily. The lesson is that no single third-party signal is safe to depend on, and the assets that gained (canonical, first-party, verifiable pages) are the ones you can actually own. ...

The short answer Each AI engine reads a different map of the internet before it recommends a hotel — and most of that map is not your website. A 13-week analysis of 230,000 prompts and more than 100 million citations found Perplexity’s most-cited domains are led by Reddit, LinkedIn and Microsoft (AEO Vision, June 7, 2026) — while for commercial-intent queries specifically, Perplexity pivots to review aggregators and structured comparison sources: TripAdvisor, Yelp, NerdWallet, PCMag (Profound analysis, cited in 5WPR’s State of AI Citations, May 19, 2026). Google AI Overviews, meanwhile, leans on YouTube more than any other source family (AI Citation Behavior Index, June 30, 2026). And across engines, a single domain — Wikipedia — absorbs 8.9% of all citation slots, with Reddit adding another 11.4% spread across its subreddits (Attrifast, 1,200-prompt study, May 26, 2026). ...