Reddit, a hybrid platform that combines a forum and a social network, has shown impressive growth in English-language search results in recent months. Last year, the domain was ranked 78th among the most visible websites in the USA, and today it is ranked 3rd – an increase that is unparalleled. Reddit has also been experiencing an upward trend in the major European markets for several months, although this is (at least currently) much less pronounced.
This development is particularly notable in light of a deal that Reddit made with Google earlier this year – for an annual cost of 60 million US dollars, Google will gain access to Reddit content. To make this access more valuable, Reddit has temporarily blocked all other crawlers from crawling the entire website using a new robots.txt file. Currently only Google has permission to access this data.
The common explanation for the massive increase in Reddit visibility is that this increase in the Visibility Index was necessary to closely link organic search with Google’s new AI Overview features: Since Google wants to display authentic user content from Reddit in the AI boxes, the domain must also have a strong organic presence.
Although this theory seems plausible at first glance, it does not stand up to a reality check in the search results.
In the UK, 49.4% of search results with an AI Overview contain an organic result from Reddit, while Reddit is only cited as a source in the AI Overview in 0.056% of cases. For comparison: Wikipedia is present as an organic result in 47% of AI Overviews and is cited as a source in 10.4% of cases. On YouTube, it is 48% organic results and 6% sources – significantly more than on Reddit. Whatever Google is currently doing with the Reddit data, it is not as a (cited) source for AI Overviews.
