I love Reddit. You probably do too.
But increasingly, you may have noticed it gaining more prominence than you’d expect a simple forum to receive. It’s all over the news, and certainly all over your Google Search results — quietly going from a fledgling forum born in the internet’s awkward teen years to the most important backbone of Google Search. Increasingly, it’s becoming an important part of the future of the internet too, thanks to AI.
There might be more to the story, though, than just natural organic growth of a popular platform. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that old internet adage — if you’re not a paying customer, you are the customer.
Google suddenly loves Reddit
We have some new data on the increasingly tight relationship between Reddit and Google Search.
According to Similarweb, Reddit traffic from Google has reportedly increased by 50% just since September of 2023. Meanwhile, as of June 2024, Google now represents 60% of its overall traffic, with just a third of its traffic coming directly from reddit.com.
This is no coincidence, of course. According to the report, this increase in traffic is thanks to people upending the word “reddit” to searches, such as “Elden Ring reddit.” You may have noticed this behavior in yourself in attempts to skip past the hordes of optimized articles slathered in ads in hopes of finding a simple answer to your question. This is also a way for people to arrive at a subreddit rather than going to reddit.com.
Of course, this isn’t the only reason for the huge bump in traffic. This report doesn’t comment on it, but Google has also recently begun to elevate Reddit and other forums in searches. The “expanded partnership” with Reddit was announced in February of 2024, raising visibility with “content-forward displays of Reddit information.” At the time, Google praised Reddit as playing “a unique role on the open internet” and for offering an “incredible breadth of authentic, human conversations and experiences.”
Shortly after, it became clear that Reddit posts were being moved up and highly ranked, often above firsthand sources and reputable sites. Reddit also recently blocked out other search engines from crawling its site, only approving paying partners like Google. Suffice to say, Reddit and Google are more interlinked than ever, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
Now, you might be thinking that Google Search doesn’t constitute the internet as a whole, which you’d certainly be right about. But if you consider AI the next evolution of search, Reddit is playing an even bigger role there.
AI built on Reddit
The goal of AI chatbots is to sound as much like a human as possible, and to do that, it needs records of conversations. Lots of them. Meta has Facebook and Instagram data to train from for its open-source Llama models, while Grok is pulling from X (formerly Twitter). But the two biggest players in the game, OpenAI and Google, don’t have those same treasure troves of human interaction to train with.
That’s where Reddit comes in.
In February, reports indicated that Google was paying $60 million to train its Gemini models on Reddit data. In direct proof of this, when Google rolled out its sloppy introduction of AI Overviews, it sometimes directly quoted Reddit posts — to sometimes hilarious results. OpenAI followed that up just a couple of months later with its own deal with Reddit, cementing its role in the two primary chatbots. It’s worth noting that OpenAI is also working on its own search engine, which will most certainly use Reddit as an important barometer.
As a third-party source of recorded human conversations, the conversations on Reddit are certainly being baked into the pie of AI language models. Connecting the dots, it’s not a reach to assume that Google has some ulterior motives by propping up Reddit across Search.
Of course, I can’t say for sure that the need to train Gemini is the sole reason for Google to favor it in search results. For now, at least, Google Search, remains the backbone of the company for now. And I can see the value in elevating user-based forums in some instances, especially since Google has data to imply that people trust it as a source of information.
But I can say this: as much as Google wants us to believe it makes algorithm changes for the benefit of users and individual websites, it’s undeniable that its AI model is benefitting by pushing more traffic to Reddit. In theory, the more traffic it feeds to Reddit, the more data it will have to train Gemini with.
Google needs Reddit to keep thriving, and it just so happens to have the power to do just that.
