Ahrefs studied 66.6 million ChatGPT responses and the 15 million follow-up searches ChatGPT ran behind the scenes. When ChatGPT searches inside one website, 75.9% of the most common of those searches point at a brand site. The word "official" appeared in 13.1% of English searches in September, up from 10.1% in August.
The community picture has shifted fast. Ahrefs found ChatGPT's Reddit citations dropped 88% in six months. OpenAI's publisher partners held a 12.5% share of citations among the top 200 cited domains in late September. Put simply, ChatGPT is moving away from sites that summarise towards the sources that produce the information.
For PR, that means two jobs. Get covered by the publications ChatGPT trusts, and make your own site the clearest official source on your product. Reddit still shows you what real customers say, so keep listening there, but don't build your visibility plan on threads alone. Ahrefs notes this is a snapshot of one model, so it may change.