If you’ve been thinking that Reddit results have been popping up a lot lately when you search on Google, you’re not imagining it.
The internet is in turmoil, and for website owners, the rules for winning at Google search are more unclear than ever.
From the other direction, posts from Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums flood in via the traditional set of Google links.
According to data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search rankings, traffic to Reddit has been increasing at an incredible rate since August. Semrush estimated that Reddit’s visitors exceeded 132 million in August 2023. At the time of publication of this article, he was predicted to have over 346 million visitors in April 2024.
Organic search traffic to Reddit over the past two years sem rush
None of this is a coincidence. For years, Google has been watching users continue to use Reddit until the end of their search queries, and has finally decided to do something about it.
Google has started dropping hints in 2022, promising it will do a better job of promoting more useful and human sites than just chasing the top search results.
Last August, Google seemed to do just that by rolling out a big update to search. Reddit, Quora, and other forum sites are starting to gain more visibility on Google, both within traditional links and in the new “Discussions & Forums” section (as you may have noticed if you’re based in the US) .
The timing of this Reddit clash has given rise to several conspiracy theories. In February, Google and Reddit announced a major deal that will allow Google to train AI models on Reddit’s content. Google said the deal, reportedly worth $60 million, “facilitates a more content-forward display of Reddit information,” and that Google promised to improve Reddit’s visibility in exchange for valuable training data. This has led to some speculation that this may be the case. A few weeks later, Reddit also went live.
A Google spokesperson told BI: “Our agreement with Reddit never included ranking our content higher in search.”
In fact, SEO experts have been noticing Reddit’s rise since August, when Google rolled out a significant search update six months before the deal was announced.
It’s not just Reddit. According to data from Q&A forums Semrush and Sistrix, Quora has significantly increased its visibility in Google search results. Google says “hundreds” of other forums and communities across the web are similarly affected.
Still, its rise is most notable given Reddit’s size. According to data from Sistrix, Reddit now appears as high in Google search results as Instagram.
Reddit visibility in Google search now matches Instagram visibility systrix
Steve Paine, marketing manager at Sistrix, said the rise of Reddit is “unprecedented.”
“For at least the last five years, no website in the U.S. has risen in search prominence this fast,” he told Business Insider.
Currently, Reddit ranks highly for product searches. Payne said Reddit’s main competitors are Wikipedia, YouTube and Fandom, and it also competes in “high-value commercial search” to take on Amazon. He said the “real competition” is the subreddits that compete with brands on the web.
give people what they want
Why Google does this and why now?
The company’s stance here is simple: give users what they want.
“We’ve found that people often want to learn from other people’s experiences on a topic, which is why we continue to work to make it easier to find helpful perspectives in searches related to your queries,” a Google spokesperson told BI. ,” a Google spokesperson told BI. “Our system displays content from hundreds of forums and other communities across the web and conducts rigorous testing to ensure the results are useful and of high quality.”
Reply to X’s postDanny Sullivan, Google’s head of search, said that not only do users like to see “forum content,” they also “actively search for it.”
This shift in search behavior has already been happening for several years. In July 2022, Google’s head of search Prabhakar Raghavan said younger users are turning to alternative sources like TikTok and Instagram for information and recommendations. Last year, in June, his Google searches took a big turn for the worse when Reddit went out.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaking at Google IO 2023 Josh Edelson/Getty
Google’s Reddit deal and support for Reddit content in search shows how much Google sees Reddit as an important part of the future of search.
“It’s clear that Google has a vision that they need more user-generated content,” said Aleida Solis, an SEO consultant at Orainty. He added that this is one way Google can respond to the increase.
Google may not be pumping Reddit’s results in exchange for training data, but Google’s AI systems will benefit from the more up-to-date information Reddit can provide, especially if SGE is rolled out in earnest. you will benefit from it.
Additionally, a paper written by several Google employees published in late 2023 claims that chatbots can be made more accurate by retrieving information from internet searches.
The method, called FreshPrompt, improves chatbots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT by incorporating “relevant and up-to-date information from search engines.”
Scammers can hijack search
The question is, will this Reddit bump continue or will Google nerf it? Reddit’s reliance on unpaid moderators to police offensive content and spam poses risks.
Google told BI that its system works with all websites, including Quora and Reddit. Still, there is evidence that people are already exploiting his rise in Google rankings for these sites. In his February research, SEO blogger Glen Allsopp found that 51% of his top comments in Reddit’s top threads in the forum section of Google Search contained spam.
YouTube is already filled with videos offering advice on how to hijack Reddit to get to the top of Google searches. One of the most popular videos of the moment asks viewers to buy abandoned Reddit accounts, scour popular posts on Reddit, post comments full of affiliate links, and buy from third-party websites. It teaches how to artificially inflate popularity by using “upvotes”. By doing so, you will be able to rise to the top of Google.
It may not be that difficult. Search Engine Journal reported this week that one Reddit user said within minutes he was ranked at the top of Google search results (BI was able to confirm that the post ranked in the top 10, but it’s hard to get there. (We were unable to independently verify the time taken.)
A Google spokesperson said the company’s anti-spam policies apply to all content, with special attention paid to searches on sensitive topics such as health and finance.
Still, it’s unclear how well Google’s newly enhanced spam attack system will work at this point. Reddit is “heavily manipulated after all,” Solis said, and people can easily exploit it by posting content there.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at marketing agency Amsive, told BI she’s concerned that Google is “shifting the burden” of monitoring abuse onto Reddit moderators. If subreddits are ignored, they run the risk of being spammed with useless or false content.
Ray wrote on LinkedIn last week that he found an example of Reddit ranking prominently at the top of Google when searching for “how to lose 10 pounds in a week.”
“The Redditor suggested ‘cutting off his arm,'” she wrote.
This raises the question of whether Google will be able to prevent malicious content from being gobbled up by its AI-generated search engines, which often get responses from top search results. Google is already battling an influx of AI-generated content on the web. At the same time, rivals like OpenAI and Perplexity are trying to steal Google’s lunch with AI chatbots that act like search engineers.
A Google spokesperson told BI that the company’s analysis has not found that more harmful content on search comes from forums.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman Greg Doherty/Getty Images
There’s room to grow – and that’s good news for Reddit investors
The current opinion in the SEO community is that Google is too focused on community discussions. In fact, if users start complaining that having too many Reddits in Google’s search results might be a bad thing, it might need to be recalibrated.
Sistrix’s Paine says his company’s research shows that 48.9% of ranking content on reddit.com appears in the top 10 of Google search results, but only 8% appears in the top three. said that Reddit has plenty of room to grow. That’s something Reddit investors will be happy to know.
Google may also decide to change course.
SEO consultant Natalie Slater told BI: “Personally, I expect Reddit’s current dominance will subside once Google points out that the search experience hasn’t improved with Reddit’s wider adoption.” “There is,” he said.
“One of the questions is whether this visibility will be maintained,” Payne said of Reddit. “On the one hand, there is a sense that this is unprecedented growth and it has to end soon.”
On the other hand, he added, there is plenty of room for Reddit’s presence in Google search to grow further.
For now, Reddit and Google need each other, and stopping a good thing may not be in either of their interests.
