We checked the forum box against the Overview on 815 pages
Most advice on getting into AI answers through Reddit says the same thing: find the threads that already rank on Google and take part in them. On many searches Google seems to hand you that list. A "Discussions and forums" box sits on page one with two or three threads from Reddit, Quora or Facebook groups.
When Proofsource asks Google a buyer question, one search returns the AI Overview, its sources, the blue links and that box. So we could check whether the threads in the box were the ones the Overview cited.
The sample is every AI Overview with sources that we collected from October 4 to 30, 2026, for an English buyer question that doesn't name the brand, searched from the US on desktop: 4,313 answers to 2,521 questions for 168 brands in 109 accounts, with repeated identical answers dropped. The box appeared on 815 of them (18.9%).
The Overview cited 4.2% of the threads in the box
The 815 boxes held 2,111 threads, about 2.6 each. The AI Overview on the same page cited 88 of them (4.2%). In 734 of the 815 searches (90.1%) it cited none of the box's threads, even though 253 of those Overviews (31.0%) cited a forum page of some kind.
- Reddit: 48 of 955 threads cited (5.0%, 95% interval 3.8% to 6.6%).
- Quora: 15 of 503 (3.0%).
- Facebook groups: 12 of 480 (2.5%).
A Reddit thread in the blue links was cited 3.4 times as often
The box and the blue links never shared a thread on the same page: 0 of the 2,111 box threads also appeared as a regular result. Google keeps them apart. That gave us a fair comparison.
On the same 815 pages, 436 Reddit threads ranked in the regular results. The Overview cited 75 of them (17.2%, 95% interval 13.9% to 21.0%), against 5.0% for the Reddit threads in the box. Across all 4,313 searches, Reddit threads in the regular results were cited 307 times out of 2,286 (13.4%).
Google's own description of the box is modest. It launched forum markup in November 2023 so sites could be "considered" for the Discussions and forums feature, and said the markup "does not guarantee appearance". Nothing in that says the box is what the Overview reads.
60% of the cited Reddit threads weren't on page one at all
The Overviews cited 879 Reddit threads in total. 48 (5.5%) were in the forum box on that page and 307 (34.9%) were in the blue links. The other 524 (59.6%) appeared nowhere on page one.
So "threads that rank" covers about two in five of the threads that got cited, and the box covers about one in twenty. Most of what the Overview reached for was nowhere on the page the buyer saw.
What we'd do
- Start from the threads the Overview already cites. Search your buyer's question, open the Overview's sources, and write down every forum link.
- Next, the Reddit threads ranking in the blue links for that question. They were cited about one time in six.
- Treat the forum box as a list of conversations, not a list of sources. Join those threads if your buyers are in them, not because the Overview reads them.
- Say who you are in any thread you reply to, and follow the community's rules. A thread that gets cited is read by people too.
- Recheck monthly. A thread cited today can be gone from the next answer.
How Proofsource handles it
Proofsource lists the community threads each engine cited for the questions you track, with the question that surfaced each one. That is the list to start from, rather than the box.
Where this could be wrong
Each answer is one search, from the US on desktop, at one moment. Overviews change between searches, so a box thread we counted as left out may be cited next time.
We matched Reddit threads by their thread ID and other pages by address. A thread cited through a copy or a different address would be missed. We only saw page one, so "nowhere on page one" doesn't mean the thread doesn't rank.
Being cited isn't the same as your brand being named. We counted citations of threads, not whether a thread mentioned anyone.
The box appeared on fewer than one in five of these searches, and the questions come from categories our users chose to track. Other categories, countries and devices may look different.
