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Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

Social citations are climbing across every major AI model, and owned brand content isn’t keeping pace
Substack was measured by Goodie’s citation study for the first time ever, and Claude is the model driving nearly all of it
Claude runs an entirely different social diet than every other model, TikTok and Substack heavy, and it has never once cited Reddit
The same trust signal now winning audiences over is the one AI models are starting to cite, which changes what brands need to publish to show up in AI search

AI wants to stop being sloppy and start being something closer to a tasteful individual.

Goodie’s latest study, AI’s Social Diet: How AI Search Cites the Social Web, gives that theory some data to stand on. The study tracked 1,856,259 social citations across 10 AI surfaces and 29 social domains from January through August 2026. It found that social’s share of AI citations grew 47% in that window. It also found that Claude runs on a diet of long-form, single-byline platforms that almost no other model shares.

That pattern runs alongside the cultural backlash against AI slop and the rise of tastewashing to suggest that AI engines may be reaching for human-written content to borrow a little taste of their own.

Substack as the source

Substack appeared in Goodie’s social citation data for the first time this year, with 1,226 citations. That’s small at face value, but three models account for 72% of those citations: Grok (355), Claude (271), and Google’s AI Mode (262). Claude sends 7.7% of its own social citations to Substack which is 21 times the pooled rate and the highest newsletter weight of any model tracked.

Substack’s July launch of its AI detection tool sits neatly next to that finding. With the tool, the platform positioned itself as one of the few places left where the writing still belongs to a person, and that’s the kind of content Claude appears to favor.

Claude according to Claude

For the sake of curiosity I decided to ask Claude why it’s citing Substacks more so than other LLM’s. This is what Claude said.

I then decided to ask ChatGPT the same question.

Neither model can see its own retrieval pipeline, so both answers are educated guesses. Still, they overlapped on Claude’s distinct search setup, Substack’s long-form expert writing, and Claude’s lighter reliance on Reddit.

Goodie’s findings confirm Claude cites Reddit at effectively zero, but it’s worth noting Reddit has been suing Anthropic since June 2025, so the absence may be legal rather than editorial. ChatGPT is mirroring that at a smaller scale, with their Reddit citations falling from 8.0% of its total citations to 2.9% in mid-August.

ChatGPT also claimed Substack is disproportionately represented in what Claude retrieves. That could be an LLM throwing shade, but Claude’s own answer made the same point, crediting the sheer volume and accessibility of Substack content.

Experts as the source

Claude’s emphasis on “expert and B2B writing” lines up with the rise of intellectual influencers over the past year. Fatigue with AI slop and superficial influencer content pushed audiences toward educational, explainer-style creators, and most of those creators live on TikTok.

Claude’s TikTok numbers follow that audience with TikTok citations going from single digits to 62% of Claude’s social citations by mid-August. Anthropic has also partnered with thought leaders like Eugene Healey to position Claude as a tool for thinking, which puts the company’s brand strategy and its product’s citation habits in lockstep.

What we’ve arrived at is that Claude is citing more and more TikTok and Substack content, the latter specifically for expertise. At the same time, there is an anti-AI-slop movement running in tandem with a rise in intellectual content that Anthropic itself is actively partnering with to leverage Claude as something more human.

What it means for brands

This presents a unique opportunity, as well as a potential hurdle, for brands and companies looking to leverage themselves in AI search and citations.

With Claude taking more and more users from ChatGPT, as well as Reddit decreasing in citations from both ChatGPT and Claude, more and more brands may find themselves having to embrace long-form, expert-level content on platforms like Substack, TikTok, and YouTube to leverage themselves in AI search.

Here at NoGood, we’ve seen an increase in AI citations to our own Substack from LLMs. In the past 30 days, we’ve received views from Claude, Perplexity and ChatGPT. As Substack continues to see increasing citations and traffic from these engines, brands that embrace long-form, expert writing may find themselves benefiting from the same trend.

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AI Is Citing Your Substack