Reddit Beats Brands and the Press in Australian AI Shopping Answers, Study Finds

When Australians ask an AI assistant what to buy, the single most cited website is Reddit. That is the headline finding of the Australian AI Source Index, published on September 30, 2026 by Findrix, a company that sells AI visibility tracking.

How the study worked

Findrix asked 23,000 shortlist-style buying questions in September 2026, such as which law firm, which bank, or which sunscreen. It ran them on three engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. It then counted 228,000 citations, meaning links in an answer to a site the engine used.

The questions covered nine Australian markets, including clinics, home services, finance, legal, fashion, beauty, and B2B software.

The main findings

Reddit is the most cited domain overall, with more than 3,000 citations. Two legal directories, Legal 500 and Chambers, came second and third. Facebook, YouTube, and the Australian Taxation Office also made the top ten.

Reddit outranks the press in fashion and beauty. In fashion, Reddit was cited four times as often as Vogue Australia. In beauty, Reddit and the retailer Adore Beauty each outranked every brand's own website.

When an engine uses a Reddit thread, it usually names it. Findrix says that when an engine pulled in a Reddit thread, it cited it in the answer seven times out of ten, a higher rate than any newspaper or magazine.

Comparison and directory sites lead regulated categories. In finance, Canstar was cited more often than any bank. In legal, three of the top four sources were international directories.

Services are answered locally, products are not. More than 85 percent of citations in clinics, home services, and finance went to .au domains. In fashion and beauty the figure was about half, and in B2B software about one third.

Your own website is still the biggest source

The finding brands should notice most: businesses in the market, their competitors, and retailers made up about 65 percent of all sources the engines pulled in. Publishers were about 11 percent. Only about one source in five was a place a brand could reach through press, directories, forums, or review sites.

"The company's website is the one source every brand controls, and most brands have never checked what AI finds there." Yosif Meerman, co-founder of Findrix

The engines do not agree

In most markets, fewer than half of the top 20 sources appeared on all three engines. Findrix's charts show Google AI Mode leaning more on intermediaries and social sources, while ChatGPT relied more on institutional sources.

How to read this study

Findrix sells the kind of tracking this study demonstrates, and the results come from one country in one month. The method, tens of thousands of prompts across several engines, is sound for spotting patterns. Treat the exact rankings as specific to Australia in September 2026.

What to do with it

Findrix's own recommendations line up with what we see elsewhere:

1. Check all three engines. A source list built from ChatGPT alone will miss most of what Google's AI features cite.
2. Fix the pages you own first. Answer the buyer's question in the first 60 words, and put price, specifications, and credentials in the text rather than in images or behind a form.
3. Work the third-party sources your market trusts. That means Reddit and the beauty press in beauty, directories in legal, and comparison sites in finance. Treat this as standing work, not a one-off campaign.
4. Plan across borders in product categories, where about half of the sources are not local.