Reddit Domain Analysis – Growth, Valuation, Competitors, and Stability

From:

Steve Paine

Published: 19.02.2024

Modified: 21.02.2025

The domain reddit.com is the 3rd most visible domain in Google Search, US. The US Visibility Index for Reddit represents a click-potential of over 616 million clicks per month from organic positions in search. (20th Feb 2025).

In the image above it’s also clear to see rises from NL, DE and ES countries that started in late 2024.

The image below shows the performance overview for the domain in Google US search.

Reddit brand in Google search

At the very least, presence in search results for non-brand searches is good brand marketing for Reddit, but how about the on-brand keywords?

The brand keyword environment – 58 related keywords – has a monthly average traffic value of 3.49 million searches in the USA. Indicators are that brand-related searches are rising. The domain reddit.com has an organic traffic brand ownership value of 0.34. This means that the domain has the potential to attract 34% of the total search volume for the brand-related searches.

Among brand searches for reddit, there are other competitors that Google thinks are relevant to the brand searches. Wikipedia should be no surprise. Here are the top 10 domains that also get traffic from brand search terms, along with the Visibility Index based on these brand searches.

Reddit user traffic

The reddit.com search footprint is an important part of the Reddit strategy.

Our success depends partly on our ability to attract online visitors to our website. We rely, in part, on internet search engines, such as Google, to generate traffic to our website, primarily through free or organic searches… Source: Reddit form 10-K for 2024 (PDF)

Traffic should bring new users to the platform where they will see ads, can be converted to subscribers, app users or paying subscribers. 

The big question is, will it continue to be as visible, could it grow, or will it lose visibility? Wikipedia, a well-organised user-generated content site, is the benchmark here.

As the most visible website on the internet, wikepedia.org is 3.48 times more visible in search than reddit.com. (Feb 2025). Google may have a special place for this independent information source and Reddit might be more commercially positioned, but, theoretically, there’s more space for Reddit in organic search.

By the measure of ranking distribution in the USA, a good measure of content performance, we can see that only 3.47M of 29.3M (11%) rankings seen by SISTRIX appear in the Top 3 of search results. 43% appear in the top 10. It’s a very high-performance figure, but it also means that over 50% of rankings have potential for improvement into the first page of results.

How is Google competing with reddit.com?

9% of the SERPs for which reddit.com rank have an AI Overview box at the top of the SERP, taking eyeballs and clicks away.

The domain also competes with many more features from Google that are present in the search results.

The top 100 subreddits in search

Thanks to well-organised information directories on the website under the /r subreddit directory we can find the most successful topics on Reddit. 

In tabular form, here are the top 100 subreddits – directories that potentially bring the most clicks through Google search. (US data.) and the Visibility Index of that individual directory.

For reference, 99.9% of all domains we have in our database have a Visibility Index of less than 0.1. All of these directories can be considered successful content clusters in their own right.

Who are Reddit’s competitors in search?

There are obvious competitors in Fandom, Quora and YouTube. Amazon and Wikipedia cannot be ignored either but Google, with its feature boxes, shopping boxes and other ads is also a competitor. There are hidden competitors too.

Firstly, across the complete domain, the top 20 competitors, excluding Google’s SERPs features, look like this:

The top list of competitors for reddit.com isn’t surprising but it’s at the subreddit level where the competitors get interesting. Here are six popular subreddits and the top competitors that aren’t part of the above list.

It’s clear that there are large, commercially-focused domains that compete. Each subreddit has its own competitor landscape.

The most visible URL in Feb 2024 was in r/buyitforlife – a thread on the “best coffee maker”

The most visible URL in Feb 2025 was in the /r/YouShouldKnow subreddit and it’s about something that’s probably not legal in most countries. It relates to free movies.

Stability

Can we look into a crystal ball and determine the future? No. Nobody knows when or how the next Google algorithm update will affect reddit.com or user-generated content in general. Nobody knows how the development of AI features in the SERP will affect the click rates. Nobody knows how much of the users’ Reddit information is going to reappear as unique answers through large language models in the future. Nobody knows how the competitors’ activity will affect the search results.

At SISTRIX we often look to see how a domain has reacted to Google updates in the past as an indicator of stability and over the last 12 months there hasn’t been a single negative impact from a Google algorithm update.

The 18 month gains, however, are unprecedented and leave a big question mark over the domain’s stability for 2025.

While long-term stability is a good sign, there are examples of domains that turned the corner and dropped off the cliff. Keep tourscanner.com in mind:

If you want a user-generated content example, Craigslist is a good one:

Spam and automated content in Reddit

Finding usable data to measure the level of ‘spam’ content at this level is very difficult. A glance through some of the top search terms revealed nothing obvious although if you looked closely at the “best coffee maker” example above, you might have noticed something a little non-user-generated there.

It would need a more extensive study in order to determine whether the successful URLs contain spam or low-quality automated content, despite the moderation that is supposed to reduce this spam content.

Brand strength for third-parties

A concern of some people is the strength of Reddit URLs in brand searches. Reddit does indeed appear for many brand searches. This examples shows Reddit ranking at #10 for Bestbuy.

At first glance it’s a good result but unless you’re at position 1 for a brand search there’s only a low  probability of a click.  The following CTR graph relates to brand searches.

After sorting and filtering 21 million ranking keywords for brands, it is difficult to find anything significant in the top three positions for brands. 

Summary

Reddit is a user-generated information ecosystem that has achieved traction in Google Search that in unprecedented.

The major UGC websites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Fandom and YouTube compete across the board as you would expect but when you drill down into the subreddits, each has its own competitive environment. 

Over 43% of all reddit.com (US) rankings appear in the Top 10 but only 11% in the top three positions. There is potential for growth.

The huge, and continuing growth in Visibility Index in the last 12 months puts the domain in uncharted territory in terms of stability.

In the first edition of this report – October 2024 we wrote: “Despite a good 12 month track record, a close working relationship with Google and room for improvement, it wouldn’t be wrong to expect some sort of correction over the next 12 months.” We are now in Feb 2025 and the domain is still rising in visibility.

Finally, on the topic of stability and risks, Reddit must remain attractive to users. Myspace is the example to keep in mind:

Further information sources

10-K report for 2024 (Annual Report, PDF)

Reddit AI licensing deal.

Google announcement: Reddit partnership.

The data used in this report is from SISTRIX. You can find out more about the Visibility Index here. All images above have links into the SISTRIX data for those with an account. (Free trial periods are available.)