Reddit is the leading single domain in the large US Perplexity samples, and it is not half of Perplexity. Profound's share of every citation, August 2024 to June 2025, puts Reddit at 6.6%. The 46.7% figure is that same row divided by the top 10 only. Ahrefs' US list updated 2 September 2026, a share of the top 50's citations, has Reddit at 21.6% and YouTube at 20.8%.
- 6.6% and 46.7% are one Profound row. Reddit was 6.6% of all Perplexity citations and 46.7% of the top 10. The article says the second figure does not represent overall volume.
- YouTube was first in the US in June 2026 on Ahrefs mention share, at 32.4% of the top-source sum, with Reddit at 16.6%. By the 2 September snapshot they had swapped, 21.6% to 20.8%.
- On commercial prompts in January 2026, Reddit was 24% of Perplexity citations in Tinuiti's panel, and YouTube was 3%. That is a mid- and lower-funnel sample, not the all-topic web.
- No retrieved ranking has a news publisher as Perplexity's single top domain. In the September Ahrefs ten, the New York Times is tenth at 1.6% of the top-source pool.
- Ahrefs mention share is a share of the top sources, not of every citation. Tinuiti's 24% is a share of citations on commercial prompts. They must not be plotted as a rise from 6.6%.
The list, with the denominator on it
Perplexity has not published its own domain table. The cleanest all-citation ranking that has been published is still Profound's, from the same 680 million citation dataset as the ChatGPT list, running August 2024 to June 2025. Wikipedia is not in this ten. Quora is not in this ten. Quora's large shares belong to Google, and they are kept on the community-domain page.
| Rank | Domain | Share of all citations | Share of the top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6.6% | 46.7% | |
| 2 | YouTube | 2.0% | 13.9% |
| 3 | Gartner | 1.0% | 7.0% |
| 4 | Yelp | 0.8% | 5.8% |
| 5 | 0.8% | 5.3% | |
| 6 | Forbes | 0.7% | 5.0% |
| 7 | NerdWallet | 0.6% | 4.5% |
| 8 | TripAdvisor | 0.6% | 4.1% |
| 9 | G2 | 0.6% | 4.0% |
| 10 | PCMag | 0.5% | 3.7% |
The current US head, measured differently, is Ahrefs Brand Radar. Over 3.1 million US queries, all topics, page updated 2 September 2026. Mention share is a percentage of the summed citations of the top 50 sources.
| Rank | Domain | Mention share of the top 50 | Pages cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | reddit.com | 21.6% | 892,114 |
| 2 | youtube.com | 20.8% | 1,059,603 |
| 3 | en.wikipedia.org | 6.3% | 110,188 |
| 4 | facebook.com | 4.5% | 158,230 |
| 5 | amazon.com | 3.6% | 105,853 |
| 6 | healthline.com | 2.6% | 14,312 |
| 7 | alibaba.com | 2.0% | 58,974 |
| 8 | oreateai.com | 1.8% | 50,306 |
| 9 | goodhousekeeping.com | 1.7% | 6,742 |
| 10 | nytimes.com | 1.6% | 6,259 |
YouTube has more distinct pages than Reddit and a slightly smaller mention share. Quora, Stack Overflow, and Stack Exchange are not in the top 50. Rank 50, eBay, is 0.5% of that pool, so any omitted domain has fewer citations than that inside this sample. That is an upper bound on mention share, not a measured share of all citations.
A June 2026 copy of the same Ahrefs series, the live URL having since been overwritten, had YouTube at 32.4% and Reddit at 16.6%. The September arrows say they swapped rank against the prior month. August's percentages were not frozen on the page.
When YouTube is first instead
Treat "Reddit is Perplexity's top source" as a US statement with a date on it. It fits Profound through June 2025, Profound's cross-engine ranks through late October 2025, Semrush's October 2025 refresh, Tinuiti's January 2026 commercial panel for the domains they quantify, and the September 2026 Ahrefs list. It does not fit June 2026 in the US, and it does not fit the country cuts below.
Japan, Ahrefs, cumulative citations from December 2025 to 31 March 2026: YouTube 152,023, Japanese Wikipedia 137,718, note.com 85,511, Rakuten 65,352, Ameblo 57,733. An October 2025 Japan count had Yahoo! Chiebukuro first, and it had left the top five by the March cut. A late-September 2026 Japan release said YouTube, previously first on Perplexity there, was outside the top ten. The replacement ten was not in the text.
Spain, Ahrefs, 22 October 2025, response counts rather than shares: YouTube 115,291, Spanish Wikipedia 56,639, Reddit 51,859, TikTok 48,662. Sorank's panel through August 2026 was 79% French and put YouTube at 3.46% against Reddit at 1.51%. The page does not spell out that denominator in the text retrieved. The direction is enough. A French-heavy buyer panel does not reproduce the US Reddit lead.
On the commercial side the Reddit lead gets larger, not smaller. Tinuiti, using Profound, January 2026, nine categories, static mid- and lower-funnel prompts: 31% of Perplexity citations were social, of which Reddit was 24% of all citations and YouTube 3%. Amazon was missing from Perplexity's citations in that window, in the context of Amazon's crawler blocks. Evertune, tracking only four domains across more than 200 million prompts, saw Reddit in 20% or more of Perplexity responses on some January and February 2026 weeks. The headline "one in five citations" is looser than the body, which is answer presence.
The lawsuit did not publish a before and after
Reddit sued Perplexity on 22 October 2025, in the Southern District of New York, alongside data-scraping firms. The complaint says citation volume rose after a May 2024 cease-and-desist. A secondary account of the complaint says "forty-fold." The Verge account that was re-read confirms an increase and does not give the multiplier. The forty-fold figure is an allegation, not an independent count.
On 31 July 2026 Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected most of a motion to dismiss. That is not a finding that the allegations are true. The citation panels that cross the filing still have Reddit first or near first on US Perplexity. None of them holds the prompt set fixed across 22 October. Open question A paired before-and-after has not been published.
What this does not prove
It does not say what replaces Reddit when no thread exists. The pre-registered version of that question is the Reddit dependency study. The unconditional runners-up are YouTube, review and research sites, and LinkedIn. Haus Research, on 310 company-fact questions through the Perplexity API, found 23.4% of citations on the company's own domain and 23.1% on B2B directories. That is an API sample, and they did not check whether a thread existed.
It also does not say the citations were accurate. Named audits exist, and they measure different tasks: a 2023 retrieval paper, the Tow Center's March 2025 article-identification test at 37% wrong, a link-resolution paper, and Haus's 2 September 2026 check in which 34.7% of figure citations failed a generous test. Those are not domain shares. Behaviour that is not a domain list lives on Perplexity citation statistics.
How to use the list
If the prompt is a discussion, a comparison, or a "which one should I buy," Reddit is the host Perplexity is most likely to put in the footnote in a US sample, and a single thread is the usual unit. If the prompt is a fact a thread does not hold, the measured mass moves to the company, the directory, and YouTube. Publishing a better Reddit comment is not the same job as publishing the page that holds the number.
Do not import Quora's Google weight, and do not import Copilot's retailer list. The engine pages exist so those columns stay separate. The overlap between engines is small enough to plan for, and it is measured on domains cited by every engine.
Reddit was 6.6% of Perplexity citations. The 46.7% figure is that same row, divided by the top 10 only.
Share on XVerification status
Shares are copied from the studies named beside them. The June 2026 Ahrefs percentages come from a republication, because the live URL now serves September. Sorank's denominator was not fully specified in the text retrieved, so those percentages are used only for rank order. This site has not collected its own Perplexity panel.
Namdev, R. (2026). Most-cited domains in Perplexity (v1). Retrieved from https://ritiknamdev.com/blog/most-cited-domains-perplexity Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution.
The cross-engine hub is most-cited domains in AI search. The gap study is what Perplexity cites when Reddit has nothing.