Reddit's Rise to Search Dominance

And the Google SERP.....looks poor

Last week Reddit announced a historic AI partnership with Google on top of it’s upcoming anticipated IPO. As part of the agreement, Reddit is to make its content available for training the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models for $60m/year.

But the additional unsaid part has been Google diverting a substantial amount of traffic from it’s SERP to Reddit over the last few months. So far it looks like a 5x growth in SERP traffic since mid-2023.

While Google has a history of harming other sites when they monopolize search within a vertical (for example Yelp or Expedia with their own hotels, restaurants, flights booking and search features), with Reddit they did the opposite.

There’s been a sentiment that SEO garbage has been dominating too much of the top search results. And in the last few years, a way around that has been to append the keyword “reddit” after an original search term. And for some reason, we trust the authority of strangers on the internet more than something like verified LinkedIn profiles today because of the pseudonymity of the voting system and the community.

Even so, Google at the end of November 2023 added support for forums in search results which also increased traffic to other sites like Quora and LinkedIn Pulse. Even if the magnitude was not nearly the same as Reddit.

It seems like that Google is starting to defer authority on user generated content to other sites now that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn’s reputations are better than smaller niche websites. For example, Google has proven that it’s willing to outrank original sites that published their own content on sites like Reddit.

Additionally they’ll have to start dealing with the issue that Reddit results themselves are sometimes not that great. It’s not a great experience to just read a boat load of comments. And if Google must place a Reddit link in every single SERP, sometimes the closest relevant Reddit post is not going to be that high of quality nor integrity.

What does the future hold?

Reddit announced last week their S-1 in preparation for their IPO. Their S-1 shows a 20% growth in top-line revenue from 2022 to 2023 with a net loss of $90.9 million.

But Reddit apparently reported it’s first net income of $18.5 million, its first profit in two years, in the October-December quarter on revenue of $249.8 million.

What will be interesting to see is how SERP starts to shake out over the next few years. Google is facing backlash over it’s own Gemini launch and there are some arguments whether it was a result of bad training data or Google’s internal company culture affecting it’s AI outputs.

If it’s truly training data, then I can’t see Reddit’s partnership truly giving it what they need. If Google continues to push authority of posts towards bigger user generated content sites, then at some point we will see companies starting gaming Reddit’s algorithm in a similar way they used to with Google SEO results. Only this time, it’s unclear if Reddit has the means to authoritatively decide which content is truly most useful as well as Google does.

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