Which subreddits do AI search engines cite most for software recommendations?

Ranked by citations on two question types: a buyer comparing products, and a buyer looking for a product. Questions that only describe a problem are left out of the ranking. Open a row for that subreddit's most-cited threads.

The table stops at 50 buying and comparison citations, which leaves 17 of the 24 subreddits. Our own count, from 80,500 tracked AI responses, is the only source for these numbers.

The most-cited subreddit differs by engine. Perplexity (Sonar) produced 74% of the citations in this set, so its picks dominate any combined ranking. That share reflects how many Reddit threads each engine linked on the questions we track, not how good its answers are. Check the engine your buyers use.

Citation totals hide what the question was. Some subreddits are cited mostly when someone is choosing a tool, and others mostly when someone describes a problem. For subreddits with 100 or more citations:

r/aiwars has 114 citations, but only 21% come from buying or comparison questions. A software company ranking subreddits on total citations alone would rate it higher than buyers' questions justify.

• It comes from questions we track for our own clients' niches, Jan 9, 2026 to Nov 6, 2026, so it leans toward the categories those 126 brands sell in.
• Google AI Overviews and Claude are not in this dataset. The engines are OpenAI GPT models, Perplexity Sonar and Gemini Flash.
• "Software" here means the three groups we assign in our data: SaaS and startups, AI and software, and marketing and sales. A subreddit we assigned elsewhere is not counted.
• A citation means the engine linked a thread. It does not mean anyone read it, and it does not mean a brand comment there would be welcome.

Start with the subreddits above where your buyers already ask for tools, then read the threads that get cited on each subreddit's page. Our guide to Reddit for AI search covers how comments reach answers, and the subreddit selection help page covers how to narrow the list down. CommunityMentions is the company behind this data and sells a service that places comments in communities like these, at $1,000 a month. You get a free sample first, pay $1 to set up, and monthly billing starts only after you approve in Slack. Weigh the list knowing that.

• CommunityMentions AI-answer tracking, Jan 9, 2026 to Nov 6, 2026: 80,500 tracked responses, 35,381 Reddit thread citations across 2,929 subreddits (subreddit table), updated November 8, 2026.