OpenAI is showing citations differently in at least some ChatGPT sessions. The button labelled Sources that used to sit in the footer of an answer is gone in those sessions, and the citation panel now opens from the three-dot More actions menu under the label View sources.
Search Engine Roundtable published screenshots of both interface states on 13 August 2026, after Glenn Gabe reported answers that carried no visible link to the pages ChatGPT had drawn on. The list of cited pages has not been deleted. It has been moved one layer down, behind a menu a reader has to open on purpose.
What changed in the ChatGPT answer footer
Until now the pattern was simple. A ChatGPT answer that used web results ended with a Sources button in its footer. One click opened the right-side panel listing the pages the model had cited, and from that panel a reader could click through to any of them.
In the sessions Search Engine Roundtable documented on 13 August 2026, that footer button does not appear. To reach the same panel a reader has to open the three-dot More actions menu attached to the response and pick View sources. The panel that opens afterwards looks the same. Getting to it does not.
Barry Schwartz captured both states in screenshots, which is what makes this checkable rather than anecdotal. One screenshot shows the footer with the Sources button in place. The other shows the same footer without it, and the overflow menu carrying a View sources entry instead.
One extra click, and why it changes citation clicks
An interface element that is visible by default and an interface element that lives inside an overflow menu do not perform the same way. The first is seen by everyone who reads to the end of the answer. The second is seen only by people who already suspect a menu is there and go looking for it.
That gap is the entire story for anyone whose AI search reporting depends on referral clicks. The citation itself is unchanged. Your page can still be selected, still be listed in the panel, still be described accurately in the answer. The number of humans who ever open that panel is what moves.
There is a second effect worth naming. Attribution reporting in analytics tools depends on a click happening. A brand that is cited but never clicked produces no row in a referral report, which means the measurable half of AI search visibility shrinks while the unmeasurable half stays the same size. Teams that built their GEO reporting entirely on referral sessions from chatgpt.com will see a number fall without anything about their content, their rankings or their citation rate having changed.
What Glenn Gabe reported
Glenn Gabe, who spotted the change, wrote that ChatGPT was "not providing a visible link to view sources" in the sessions he saw. He added that the extra click "can definitely decrease visibility and clicks for citations that show up in the right-side panel."
That is the observation, and it is worth separating from the interpretation that followed it. Gabe described what the interface did. Whether the effect on clicks is large or small has not been measured publicly by anyone, including him.
The advertising theory is speculation, not a finding
Gabe also floated the idea that the change may be intended to keep user attention inside ChatGPT and on advertising rather than on outbound citations. He presented that as speculation, and it should be read as speculation. No evidence of OpenAI's reasoning appears in the Search Engine Roundtable report, and the report does not include any explanation from OpenAI about why the button moved.
It is a plausible theory. It is also the kind of theory that hardens into a repeated fact if nobody flags it, which is why it is worth stating plainly: as of the 13 August 2026 report, the motive behind the change is unknown.
The old path and the new path, side by side
The table below compares the two interface states that Search Engine Roundtable documented on 13 August 2026. Nothing here is inferred. Both columns come from the screenshots in that report.
| Element | Previous interface | Interface documented on 13 August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Entry point in the answer | Sources button in the footer | No Sources button in the footer |
| How the citation panel opens | One click on Sources | Open the three-dot More actions menu, then choose View sources |
| Clicks needed to see cited pages | One | Two |
| What the panel itself shows | Right-side panel listing cited pages | Right-side panel listing cited pages |
What the report did not establish
The Search Engine Roundtable write-up of 13 August 2026 is a documented observation, not a product announcement, and several things it did not answer matter for anyone deciding how to react.
- Whether this is a limited test or a full rollout. The report did not say.
- What share of users see the new layout. No percentage was given.
- Whether logged-out ChatGPT sessions behave the same way. Not covered.
- Whether the API or any other OpenAI surface is affected. Not covered.
- Whether OpenAI has explained the change. No statement from OpenAI appears in the report.
Treating any of those blanks as answered is how a UI observation turns into a bad strategy memo. The honest reading is that some ChatGPT users now need two clicks instead of one, and the scope is not public.
Who this affects and who it does not
Publishers and brands that treat ChatGPT referral sessions as a performance metric are the most exposed. If your monthly report has a line for chatgpt.com referrals and that line is used to justify content investment, the denominator underneath it may have changed for reasons that have nothing to do with your work.
Brands that already measure AI visibility by tracking whether they are mentioned in answers, rather than by counting clicks, are less exposed. Their metric never depended on the reader opening a panel in the first place.
Advertisers running paid search in Thailand or anywhere else are unaffected in the direct sense. Paid placements do not route through the citation panel. That is precisely why the change strengthens the argument for paid coverage on queries where a click has commercial value.
What to check in your own reporting this week
Four things are worth doing while the change is fresh, and none of them require guessing at OpenAI's intentions.
- Write down your current ChatGPT referral baseline. Pull the last 30 and 90 days of chatgpt.com referral sessions from your analytics before any decline shows up, so you can tell a UI-driven drop from a content problem later.
- Have two people on your team run the same prompt in ChatGPT and record which interface they get. If one sees the footer button and the other has to use the three-dot More actions menu, you have local evidence that the change is partial rather than universal.
- Separate citation rate from referral traffic in your reporting template. Citation rate is whether you appear. Referral traffic is whether someone clicked. Those two numbers can now move in opposite directions, and a report that blends them will mislead whoever reads it.
- Brief stakeholders before the number moves, not after. A decline in AI referral sessions that arrives without explanation gets blamed on the content team by default.
None of this is a reason to stop working on being cited. Being the page an AI answer draws from still shapes what the answer says about your category, and that influence exists whether or not anyone opens the panel. What changes is how you prove the work happened. Teams that already treat generative engine optimisation as a visibility discipline rather than a traffic channel have less rebuilding to do here than teams that treated it as a new source of sessions.
What this means for Thai marketers
Thai brands that started investing in GEO and answer engine optimisation over the past year usually justified the budget with a traffic story. The click was the proof. If ChatGPT keeps the citation panel behind an overflow menu, that proof gets structurally harder to produce, and the justification has to change with it.
The more durable measurement for the Thai market is brand mention and recall inside AI answers. Does ChatGPT name your brand when someone asks for the best options in your category in Thai? Does it describe your pricing, your service area or your product correctly? Those questions can be tested repeatedly without depending on anyone clicking anything, and they map better onto how Thai buyers actually behave, since a large share of the eventual conversion happens on LINE, on a marketplace or in a physical store rather than on the site that got cited.
There is a budget consequence too. On Thai commercial queries where a click has direct revenue attached, paid placement is now the reliable path to that click, and organic visibility inside AI answers is better understood as demand shaping. That is not an argument for abandoning ChatGPT SEO work. It is an argument for reporting it against the outcome it actually produces, which is being present in the answer, and letting paid channels carry the click target. Thai teams building this into their planning should also revisit how their AI SEO measurement framework attributes assisted conversions, because a mention that never produces a session still influences a purchase that lands weeks later.
Questions marketers are asking
Has OpenAI removed source citations from ChatGPT?
No. The citations still exist and the right-side panel still lists cited pages. Search Engine Roundtable reported on 13 August 2026 that the entry point moved from a Sources button in the answer footer into the three-dot More actions menu, where it is labelled View sources.
Is this a test or a permanent change?
The report did not say. Search Engine Roundtable documented two different interface states with screenshots but did not state whether the new layout is a limited experiment or a completed rollout, and no share of affected users was given.
Does this affect logged-out ChatGPT users or the API?
The report did not cover either case. It described what appeared in ChatGPT sessions and did not address logged-out browsing or any developer-facing surface.
Why did OpenAI make this change?
No reason has been made public. Glenn Gabe speculated that it may be intended to keep attention on advertising rather than on outbound citations, and he framed that as his own theory rather than as something OpenAI confirmed.
Should we stop trying to get cited by ChatGPT?
No, but the metric should change. Being cited still shapes how AI answers describe your brand and your category, so the sensible response is to measure mentions and answer accuracy rather than to keep reporting citation work as a traffic channel.
If your current AI search reporting rests on referral sessions from ChatGPT, this is a good week to rebuild it around visibility instead. Talk to Relevant Audience about setting up mention tracking for your brand in Thai and English AI answers, so the next interface change does not take your reporting with it.
