Hey Cowboys,
Happy Thursday! A new round of DTC, retail, tech, and ecommerce news heading your way today.
Today’s lineup 👇 and stories.
Today’s Squad: The DTC Growth Stack
Acquisition, retention, product, and attribution, from the people who run each one.
Jimmy Kim - Co-Founder & CEO, eCom Email Marketer
Dr. Ilon Choai - Co-Founder, NOBS
Bryan Bumgardner - Northbeam Weather Report
Reddit Nearly Vanishes From ChatGPT Citations
Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations collapsed roughly 86% in a single week, falling from a steady 3.8% to about 0.5% on August 14, according to tracking data from Promptwatch. The drop followed an unannounced August 8 change to how ChatGPT expands queries, shifting citations away from forums and review sites toward official documentation, help centers, and established company domains like Salesforce, Google, and Shopify.
The Rundown:
Reddit held a steady 3.8% share of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through August 7, then fell to 0.5% by August 14 and has stayed there
The slide began August 8, the same day ChatGPT changed its query fanout behavior to lean heavily on site: operators targeting specific trusted domains
Review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot also dropped out of citations, while help centers and documentation now account for roughly 32% of sources
Smaller company websites and blogs fell from about 66% of citations to 32%, and moderated app marketplaces rose to around 17%
Separate data from Qwairy shows a 95% collapse in Reddit citations across its monitored brands, with press, forums, and directories falling and official sources gaining
The decline is isolated to ChatGPT; Reddit's share in Google AI Overviews slipped only about 11% over the same period and remains steady on Perplexity
Promptwatch cofounder Klaas Foppen flagged the drop on X, and the chart went viral after Taylor Lorenz and others amplified it
OpenAI has not commented, and Search Engine Journal notes the cause is unconfirmed; a similar dip in fall 2025 was traced to Google blocking bulk search result scraping
Reddit signed a reported $60M per year data licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024 and joined the S&P 500 the same week the citations disappeared
Reddit's stock previously fell about 14% in October 2025 after a smaller ChatGPT citation decline
In under a week, ChatGPT went from treating Reddit as one of its most cited sources to almost ignoring it, and forum and review site traffic went with it. Whether this is a deliberate quality filter or a side effect of the retrieval change, OpenAI's silence leaves publishers guessing, and the speed of the shift shows how fragile AI referral visibility has become for any platform that depends on it.
Top Stories: AI Bama Rush, Amazon Drone Push, Pocket hits $100M ARR
AI Girl Goes Bama Rush - Olivia Moore created Janie, a fully AI-generated sorority hopeful, and ran her through Alabama’s 2026 rush week on TikTok. Her videos drew nearly 100,000 views, with viewers debating whether she was real. Moore later revealed the experiment, which cost about $100 and 30 minutes a day to produce.
Amazon Expands Drone Delivery - Amazon plans to expand Prime Air from 11 locations to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026. The service delivers packages up to five pounds in as little as 30 minutes, reaching tens of millions of customers. Amazon says it has already completed hundreds of thousands of drone deliveries this year.
Pocket Hits $100M ARR - Pocket, the AI notetaker startup, says it reached a $100 million annualized run rate just seven months after hitting $1 million. The $129 device now has more than 270,000 units in the field, with the company operating with just 12 employees. Pocket raised an $11 million round led by Accel in June.
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Postscript - Make more money from every SMS message.
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Rokt Aftersell - More profit from the orders you’re already getting.
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See you on the stream,
Ecomm Cowboy Team