Find the Reddit and G2 Pages AI Cites for Your Competitors

Key Takeaways

• Reddit alone accounts for roughly half of AI citations in most SaaS categories we've measured, more than every other source type combined. It's the single highest-leverage place to look first.
• Perplexity shows its sources inline for nearly every answer, making it the fastest way to find the exact URLs feeding a competitor's citation.
• Once you find the winning thread or review page, the fix usually isn't "write a rebuttal," it's "become part of that same conversation, genuinely."
• A handful of specific pages tend to dominate: in our own data, a competitor's top five URLs accounted for roughly a third to two-fifths of their total citations, a disproportionate share for just five pages. Find the concentration, don't spread effort evenly.
• Re-check periodically. The winning sources shift as threads age out of relevance and new ones get indexed.

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Why this is the right question to ask

Knowing a competitor gets recommended more than you is a feeling. Knowing exactly which Reddit thread or G2 page the AI pulled that recommendation from is an action item. This is the step that turns "we're losing to Competitor X" into something you can actually fix this week.

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Step 1: Use Perplexity as your discovery tool

Ask Perplexity your real buyer prompt, phrased the way an actual buyer would type it (not your brand name, not a generic category term). When it names a competitor, scroll to the numbered sources below the answer. Perplexity's citations are the most consistently visible of any major engine, which makes it the fastest starting point even if you care equally about ChatGPT or Gemini, since the underlying sources that get cited tend to overlap across engines. For the full method, including how to write the prompt and how many times to run it, see how to see exactly what Perplexity tells your buyers.

Open every cited source. For each one, note whether it mentions your competitor, whether it mentions you at all, and what type of page it is: a Reddit thread, a review site listing, a comparison article, or the competitor's own blog.

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Step 2: Search Reddit directly, not just through AI answers

Beyond what a single AI answer surfaces, search Reddit directly for your category name plus common buyer language ("[category] reddit," "best [category] tool reddit," "[category] alternative reddit"). Look specifically at threads with real engagement, upvotes and genuine replies, not dead threads with zero comments, since engagement is part of what makes a thread trustworthy enough to cite.

Read what's actually being said. If a competitor is being recommended repeatedly across multiple threads, that's a real, earned reputation you're up against, not a fluke, and it tells you the conversation is happening in a specific place you're not currently part of.

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Step 3: Check the review sites deliberately

G2, Capterra, and category-specific review sites get cited constantly because they're structured, aggregated, and inherently comparative, exactly the shape of source an AI answer likes to pull from. Search your category on each site and check: does your competitor have significantly more reviews, a higher rating, or a more complete profile than you. This is often the single most fixable gap on this list, claiming and building out your profile is entirely within your control and doesn't require anyone's permission.

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Step 4: Look for concentration, not spread

In our own data pulling AI citations across this exact category, we've seen a small number of URLs account for a disproportionate share of one competitor's total citations, five specific pages carrying roughly a third to two-fifths of hundreds of citations, not hundreds of different pages contributing evenly. That pattern holds broadly: a handful of specific, high-trust sources tend to dominate, rather than citation being spread thin across the internet.

Find your competitor's concentration. If three specific Reddit threads or two specific review pages are doing most of the work, that's exactly where your limited time is best spent, not a broad, unfocused content push.

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What to actually do once you've found the source

If it's a Reddit thread: participate genuinely, in that thread if it's still active, or in the current, active version of that same conversation if it's aged out. Don't post an obvious plant, genuine, specific, useful replies get treated differently than transparent self-promotion, both by the community and, over time, by what gets surfaced as trustworthy.

If it's a review site: invest in getting real reviews, this is slower than content work but compounds, and it's one of the few AI-citation levers that's almost entirely under your control.

If it's a comparison article or the competitor's own blog: write the more current, more specific, more useful version of that same direct answer (see the counter-article playbook for exactly how to scope that).

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Doing this across your whole prompt set

Finding the source behind one AI answer by hand takes a few minutes. Doing it systematically across 15-20 real buyer prompts, across multiple engines, and keeping track of which sources come up repeatedly, is the kind of task that's worth automating once you're doing it seriously. GetIntel's Sources view does exactly this: every domain cited across your tracked buyer prompts, ranked by how often it's cited, tagged as yours, a competitor's, or third-party, so you see the concentration pattern immediately instead of manually cross-referencing dozens of Perplexity runs.

See which sources AI is actually citing in your category, and which ones you're missing from.