Is it worth it to keep active on social media?

Or is it all just pay for play now?

by Julian Rogers

AI search is reshaping how people discover brands, and social plays a bigger role in it than many businesses realize. According to research presented by Profound, as much as 15.3% of citations in Google AI Overviews already come from social platforms.

No, that’s not a majority. But do you want to risk putting yourself behind your competitors’ momentum by 15% in every relevant search?

In a study examining LLM prompts in different languages to gauge whether outcomes shift by language used, the question was simple: does prompting LLMs in different languages produce meaningfully different source outcomes? The answer is yes, and one of the biggest areas impacted is social citations.

That influence isn't confined to your website. Community content on Reddit, Wikipedia and G2 is already outranking expert institutions and brand-owned pages in AI answers.

Are these platforms a growing opportunity for businesses? What industries benefit most and which industries are not gaining ground here?

Growing, yes. Evenly, no.

Software sellers have the clearest case. Fifty-one percent of B2B software buyers now start their research with AI chatbots more than Google — up from 29% just eleven months earlier (G2). G2 alone pulls 22.4% of citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, and 45% of buyers say review-site citations are the single most confidence-building signal an AI answer can show them.

Consumer categories — anything people already argue about on Reddit, from skincare to software to which dishwasher not to buy — ride the same wave. Reddit and Wikipedia together now drive more than 25% of all ChatGPT citations in the U.S., ahead of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Bloomberg combined (5W).

Where the ground is shakier: nobody's published a clean industry-by-industry breakdown yet. G2's own review-volume study looked at 500 categories and still couldn't say which verticals gain the most. The pattern holds in aggregate, not by name (G2). Categories with little public conversation around them (highly regulated, low-consideration, or simply unglamorous purchases) have less community content to be cited in the first place. Less discussed, less cited. That's not an industry rule. It's a content-volume rule.

Is Reddit really growing in influence with consumers? Is this "community content" considered "social media"?

It's growing, and it's volatile — both at once.

Reddit alone accounts for 11.97% of ChatGPT's U.S. citations, and its share of social citations specifically has climbed since last fall (Tinuiti). But the trend line isn't smooth. Reddit's citation share collapsed from roughly 60% to 10% in two weeks last September, and after Reddit sued Perplexity over unauthorized scraping, Perplexity's Reddit citations dropped 86% almost overnight. One platform dispute, one massive swing.

Play nice with your master. Or else. Remember the modern golden rule: LLMs do not reward great content. They reward content they can steal cleanly.

As for classification, the industry hasn't fully made up its mind. Researchers call Reddit "community-driven content" and "social media" in the same breath, and it gets counted inside social citation totals across every major study I’ve found. Functionally: yes, it's social. Just don't run it like a brand feed. Nobody's citing your polished post — they're citing the thread where real people argued it out.

Should businesses invest in Reddit, Wikipedia and (if you sell software) G2?

Yes. Three different playbooks, though.

Reddit rewards participation, not posting. Show up in the actual conversation, answer honestly, skip the sales pitch — AI models are citing the discussion, not your brand account.

Wikipedia rewards accuracy and restraint. Plenty of brands are, in the researchers' words, "getting the work catastrophically wrong." Self-promotional edits get reverted and a thin or inaccurate entry is worse than none. Get it right, or get someone who will.

G2 rewards volume and follow-through, if you sell software. The lift per review is modest on its own: 10% more reviews earns roughly 2% more citations. But that compounds: 94% of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in their purchase process, up from 89% a year earlier (Forrester). Modest and compounding beats absent every time.

And what about Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and everyone else?

Reddit, Wikipedia and G2 win the AI-citation game. They don't win the whole game.

LinkedIn is still the B2B workhorse, and the data backs it up. Seventy-six percent of B2B marketers call it the most effective channel for distributing thought leadership — ahead of email newsletters at 54% (Content Marketing Institute, 2026). Forty percent name it the single most effective platform for driving high-quality leads (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions), personal profiles out-engage company pages by 63% — 2.60% average engagement versus 1.74% (Metricool, 2026) — and three-year ROI studies put organic LinkedIn at 229%, paid at 192% (FirstPageSage). B2B marketers are voting with budget too: 17% plan to invest the most in LinkedIn of any platform next year, more than anywhere else (HubSpot, 2026).

Facebook and Instagram are the quiet overperformers. Combined, they deliver the greatest returns for 29% of B2B marketers — edging out YouTube at 26%, and beating what most people assume is a B2C-only pairing (HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing). Instagram is also the leading channel for short-form video investment among B2B marketers who've made the leap, and it's the platform 32% of consumers call trustworthy for accurate information (Gartner, 2025).

YouTube is closer to infrastructure than a platform at this point. Eighty-two percent of businesses already host content there (Wistia's State of Video report), and it's the channel consumers trust most for accurate information — 61%, ahead of every other platform Gartner tested in 2025.

TikTok is small but disproportionately profitable. Only 8% of B2B marketers had invested by 2025, but among those who did, 24% call it their top-returning channel, and 53% plan to increase spend (HubSpot, 2026). Early, but the return-per-dollar story is starting to look better than the adoption numbers suggest.

Here's the tension worth sitting with: 85% of B2B marketers skip Reddit entirely (Content Marketing Institute, 2026) — the same platform responsible for nearly 12% of ChatGPT's U.S. citations. The gap between where B2B marketers spend their time and where AI search actually pulls its answers from is real, and it's wide. LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram earn their keep on their own merits. Reddit earns its keep somewhere most marketers aren't even looking. IN other words, it’s a platform your competitors have yet to stake out.

None of this replaces a real social strategy. It resets what "worth it" means. You're not just posting for reach anymore. You're building the record AI search (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta AI, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok) pulls from when someone asks it what to buy.

We should talk. Social media strategy by the jooj. Reach out for a strategy call.