Vol.012 — Who Are We Actually Talking To?
Date: 2026-04-24 | Newsletter
Key Summary
A 2026 report on AI citations revealed that Reddit is the #1 most-cited source across major AI platforms, appearing in roughly 68% of AI-generated answers. On Perplexity alone, ~24% of all citations come from Reddit. Meanwhile, an Ahrefs study found that 80% of URLs cited by AI assistants do not rank in Google’s top 100 results for the original query. The playbooks of Google SEO and AI search relevance are now running separate games. For ASEAN business owners, the picture is more complicated: dominant community platforms here are LINE groups, Facebook groups, Zalo, and private chats — not Reddit — meaning those conversations are largely invisible to Western AI scraping. Zenta notes that 32% of people globally now turn to an AI assistant first when searching, ahead of Google at 28%, while ASEAN SME AI adoption sits at 15%. The gap between where customers are searching and where ASEAN businesses show up in AI answers is real and widening. The old SEO playbook is breaking — 60% of searches now end with zero clicks, the AI just answers directly. Knowing the game changed is the first move. Do it simple. Know the game changed. Then figure out your next move.