Ahrefs finds ChatGPT leaning on official and brand websites, with Reddit down from about 1 in 5 answers to about 1 in 43.

Schwartz reports that the Performance report rejects custom date ranges. The end date shows as 1969 and changing it returns "Date can't be after 1969-12-31." The preset ranges (24 hours, 7 and 28 days, 3 to 16 months) still work. The article carries no statement from Google, and Google's status dashboard lists no October incident (read today).

No change. ChatGPT's newest note is still the 9 October coding-app entry. Perplexity's changelog has the same October entries and nothing on Sonar. Anthropic's table still shows `claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929` retiring 30 November and `claude-haiku-4-5-20251001` as Active with "Not sooner than October 15, 2026", two days away. The engine's `main` is still `06233ce` with `gpt-5.1`, `sonar` and `claude-sonnet-4-5` in `src/adapters.ts` and `claude-haiku-4-5` in `src/extract.ts` (checked today).

Method: 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT responses (the model named is GPT-5.6 Luna) from August and September 2026, all countries, with the 15 million searches they triggered. A separate 20,000 US prompts for the official-source figures. Citation ranks come from Ahrefs' own Brand Radar product, 2.4 to 3.8 million US answers a month from March to September, with a check on about 25,000 prompts present in both months.

Figures: 14.4% of responses triggered a web search, and those ran about 1.6 searches each. 6.8% of the searches used `site:` to look inside one website, and of those aimed at the roughly 160 most-searched sites, 75.9% went to brand sites, 11.9% to retailers and 1.9% to Reddit and Facebook. The word "official" appeared in 13.1% of English searches in September, up from 10.1% in August. For fact questions, 84.4% of prompts cited at least one official source. For comparison questions, 68.3%. Official sites were 63.4% of citations on fact questions and 46.4% on comparisons. Between March and September, Reddit citations fell 88% (from about 1 in 5 answers to about 1 in 43), Wikipedia 80% and YouTube 27%. Search Engine Journal gives the shares as Reddit 19.1% to 2.3% and Wikipedia 14.1% to 2.9%. Ahrefs, as quoted there, says ChatGPT "seems to be prioritizing original sources over sites that summarize them."

Limits, in Ahrefs' words: "We also tracked free, logged-out sessions, which search less than paid or reasoning models." "These numbers are a snapshot of one model between August and September 2026." "The prompts in our study are broad." The study does not mention small or local businesses, it measures citations and not which businesses get named, the data is from the vendor's own paid product, and the free app moved to a newer model on 8 October.

About 3.77 million French citations across seven assistants, 16 August to 28 September, roughly 100 buying questions in each of 16 industries. 49.4% of French citations went to a French-declared address against 64.9% in Germany, but counting French sites on generic endings the local share is 78.8% against 79.9%. "The engines are citing the page, not the suffix." Vendor data, one 44-day window, commercial questions only.