Is Sited better than Profound? Google now cites Reddit in AI Overviews

For most founders and small marketing teams, Sited is the better choice: one $50 scorecard gives you a clear, self-serve read on your AI visibility in minutes, with no subscription and no sales call. Profound is the stronger pick if you're an enterprise that needs a team logging into a dashboard every day to track nine AI engines, run autonomous agents and hit SOC 2 compliance. Which one you need depends entirely on whether you want an audit or a platform to run, and this week's Google news makes that choice more urgent either way.

What changed?

Google has widened the rollout of its "Expert Advice" feature inside AI Overviews, pulling direct quotes and perspectives from Reddit, social media and online forums straight into its AI-generated summaries, sometimes alongside boosted link visibility and hover previews, according to Dataconomy.

The feature first appeared as part of a broader set of five updates to AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, aimed at enhancing context and highlighting relevant links. A key part of that rollout was Google's plan to leverage social media posts and online discussions as sources of "expert advice," though the criteria for determining who counts as an expert remain unclear, as reported by NewsBytes.

Five months on, the feature is still actively expanding. A separate NewsBytes report confirms the practical mechanics: users now see an "Expert Advice" section featuring real comments from forums and social media, plus links to the full conversation if they want more context.

Google originally branded the underlying mechanism "Preview of Perspectives." This section highlights quotes and advice sourced from public online discussions, labelled as "Expert Advice" or "Community Perspectives" depending on the query, pulling content from platforms such as Reddit, X, Facebook and niche forums, and displaying the creator's name, handle or community name for added context, according to MSN.

Why does this matter for your business?

This is not a cosmetic tweak. Google is now treating Reddit threads, forum posts and social media comments as citable, attributable sources inside the same summary box that sits above your organic listing. If your brand is discussed on Reddit or in niche forums, whether by happy customers, frustrated ones or competitors, that conversation can now surface directly in the AI Overview a prospect sees before they ever reach your site.

The trade-off is real. BigGo Finance notes the update raises concerns about misinformation, reduced traffic to publishers, and a blurring of the line between AI summaries and traditional search results. If a forum thread about your product is outdated, incomplete or simply wrong, Google may now be quoting it to millions of searchers, with no obvious way for you to correct the record short of engaging in that community directly.

This also expands the surface area you need to monitor. It's no longer enough to track how ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Overviews describe your brand in generated text. You now need visibility into which Reddit threads, forum posts and social comments Google's "Expert Advice" layer might be pulling forward, because those snippets carry your brand's name whether you wrote them or not.

Is Sited better than Profound for tracking this?

This is exactly the kind of shift that splits the market into two genuinely different tools, and it's worth being honest about what each does well.

Profound is built for teams that need to watch this kind of change land in real time. It's an enterprise AI search visibility platform that continuously monitors how AI engines talk about a brand, with autonomous marketing agents and crawler analytics running in the background. It covers the widest set of engines of any tool in this space, tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews, which matters if forum-sourced "expert advice" starts showing up differently across platforms. For a large content operation that wants always-on competitive benchmarking, sentiment tracking and enterprise controls like SSO/SAML and SOC 2, that continuous monitoring model earns its keep. Pricing has moved between public and demo-gated over time, but published plans have started at $99 a month for Starter and $399 a month for Growth, both billed yearly, with custom Enterprise tiers and credit-based agents on top.

For the founder or small marketing team reading this, though, that's a lot of platform to run just to answer one question: where do we stand right now, and what should we fix first? That's where Sited's model is simply a better fit. A single $50 payment, starting with a free scorecard, gets you a self-serve report in minutes, with no demo, no sales call, no dashboard to learn and no seat to manage. You get one audit with prioritised fixes, done. If Google's forum-citation expansion has you wondering whether a stray Reddit thread is now shaping your AI visibility, a point-in-time audit is the fastest, cheapest way to find out, roughly $1,200 a year cheaper than a recurring Profound subscription, with an answer today rather than a login to maintain. For this audience, Sited is the clearer choice. If you want to see where you currently stand, you can run Sited's free audit in a few minutes.

What should you do now?

Start by searching your own brand name alongside "Reddit" and "forum" to see what conversations already exist about you. If Google's Expert Advice layer is pulling from these threads, you want to know what it's finding before a customer does.

Next, treat community platforms as a citation source, not just a reputation channel. A thoughtful, accurate response on a relevant Reddit thread or forum post now has a real chance of being quoted inside an AI Overview, which makes community engagement part of your AI visibility strategy, not a separate task.

Finally, check your current AI visibility baseline. Before you decide whether you need a daily monitoring dashboard or a quick audit, it helps to know where you actually stand across the engines your customers use.

Frequently asked questions

What is Google's "Expert Advice" feature in AI Overviews?

It's an update that adds an "Expert Advice" section to AI Overviews, featuring real comments from forums and social media, plus links to the full conversation. It's also referred to as "Preview of Perspectives" or "Community Perspectives" depending on the query.

Which platforms does Google pull this content from?

Google pulls content from platforms such as Reddit, X, Facebook and niche forums, and displays the creator's name, handle or community name for added context, according to MSN.

Does this reduce traffic to my website?

It can. The update raises concerns about misinformation, reduced traffic to publishers, and blurring the line between AI summaries and traditional search results, per BigGo Finance. If Google quotes a forum post rather than linking to your site, you lose the click even when the conversation is about your brand.

Should I monitor Reddit and forums as part of my AI visibility tracking?

Yes. Since these sources can now be quoted directly inside AI Overviews, they function as citable brand touchpoints, not just background chatter, and should be part of any AI visibility review.

Is Sited or Profound better for tracking this kind of change?

It depends on your size and workflow. Profound suits enterprises that want continuous, always-on monitoring across nine AI engines with autonomous agents. Sited suits founders and small teams who want a fast, affordable, self-serve audit without taking on a subscription or a new dashboard to manage.