by Astrid Kramer, First published in german
For anyone interested in SEO and in need of some good entertainment, following Liam Fallen on LinkedIn is a must. Liam masterfully uses humor to comment on developments in the search landscape. Recently, he shared this “SEO Tip”:
While there’s always a hint of truth in humor, it’s not just Liam making this suggestion. Doppelgänger podcaster Philipp Klöckner once seriously recommended posting your content on Reddit, upvoting it, and allowing it to be included in ChatGPT’s training data.
Reddit seems to be all the rage in the marketing bubble. But what is currently going on with Google and Reddit and why should this modern love story be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism? Let’s take a look at how Reddit works and why Google entered into a partnership with the platform this year.
Allow me: Reddit. A content platform with a history
Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, two graduates of the University of Virginia. The idea behind Reddit was to create a platform where users could share, discuss and rate content. The founders wanted to create a kind of digital pinboard that would allow users to share and discuss interesting links. Originally launched as a simple forum, Reddit quickly gained popularity. The platform was acquired by Condé Nast, a large media company, back in 2006.
Reddit is a platform made up of countless subreddits—topic-specific forums created and moderated by the users themselves. Each subreddit addresses a particular topic, ranging from general interests like news and science to niche hobbies and specific interests. Users can create posts, comment, and rate them with upvotes or downvotes. These votes affect the visibility of the posts within the subreddit and across the entire platform.
A central feature of Reddit is the Karma system. Users earn Karma points for posts and comments that receive positive votes. These points serve as an indicator of a user’s activity and contributions to the community. Moderation on Reddit is largely handled by voluntary moderators, who establish and enforce rules for their respective subreddits.
Since its inception, Reddit has experienced remarkable growth. In 2020, the platform had over 14 million daily active users, and today it has already reached 57 million. With over 1.7 billion monthly users, Reddit ranks just behind WhatsApp with around 2 billion users and YouTube with about 2.5 billion, making it one of the top 10 most-visited websites in the world.
Additionally, the platform has become one of the main sources for viral content and news. Reddit is frequently used by journalists and other media outlets to track trends and stories, which are often discussed on Reddit before being published in traditional media. Its influence on the media landscape should not be underestimated.
Today, Reddit is most popular in the United States but also has a considerable user base in other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany.
Had you not yet considered Reddit?
Some of us may have underestimated the platform’s popularity until its collaboration with Google. A quick look at Google Trends sheds light on this: when comparing the global search interest for “Reddit” and “Netflix,” it becomes clear that by the end of 2023, Reddit surpassed the popular streaming service, Netflix, which is available in over 190 countries.
According to Statista, brand awareness of Reddit among social media users in Germany exceeds 50%, and in the U.S., it’s already at 77%. These figures are likely to rise even further now that Reddit’s search results are appearing more prominently in Google searches.
Google & Reddit: The Partnership
In February 2024, Google and Reddit announced a close collaboration. This partnership allows Google to efficiently access Reddit’s massive content library using the Reddit Data API. Google can now pull real-time information from Reddit to enhance search results and train its AI models.
On the other hand, the integration of Vertex AI into Reddit aims to optimize the platform’s search functions and other features. According to Google, users can expect more precise and relevant search results powered by AI.
For Google, the partnership offers an opportunity to highlight authentic, human experiences and discussions, which is especially valuable in a time where AI-generated content is becoming more prevalent. Reddit content, created and moderated by real users, provides a valuable source of genuine opinions and experiences that are difficult to replicate. This is particularly important in areas such as product reviews, where users seek honest, unfiltered opinions.
Reddit, in turn, benefits from increased visibility and improved accessibility of its content through Google products. This helps attract new users and better serve existing ones by making it easier to discover and participate in Reddit communities.
A Critical View of This Partnership
The high-profile partnership between Reddit and Google has not been met with universal enthusiasm. One of the main criticisms is the potential impact on the quality of search results. By integrating Reddit data into Google’s AI models and prominently featuring Reddit content in search results, there is a risk that the results may be more influenced by popular opinions and discussions rather than verified, high-quality information.
A famous example of this issue is the introduction of AI overviews, which sometimes deliver outrageous results. For instance, the now infamous suggestion for home cooks to use superglue to secure pizza toppings.
This amusing tip originated from an 11-year-old Reddit user who intended to troll the original thread. Anyone who has tried writing a humorous article with ChatGPT knows that AI still has a lot to learn when it comes to humor. As a result, Reddit posts that are clearly satirical can sometimes be taken seriously by AI, as seen in this example. However, in this particular case, ChatGPT has the upper hand: while Google was still clinging to the pizza-glue suggestion in June 2024, ChatGPT warned that glue on pizza could be harmful to health.
Another critical aspect of this partnership is the commercial angle. Reddit is set to receive $60 million annually, as Google pays for the rights to use Reddit’s data for training its AI models. Reddit also saw its stock price rise by over 50% after its IPO in March, reaching an all-time high by June. This IPO might have been one of the reasons Reddit agreed to the deal with Google, aiming to increase its company value.
Naturally, content creators, the ones tirelessly generating, commenting on, and rating content, are left out of this lucrative deal.
Playing hard to get: How it all began
Initially, the relationship between Reddit and Google was rather strained. Reddit publicly considered blocking Google from accessing its data, fearing Google might use Reddit’s content for free to train its AI models. By the end of 2023, there was talk of placing all content behind a login, making it inaccessible to Google. Alternatively, Reddit could block Google’s and Bing’s bots from crawling its site, so Reddit content would no longer appear in search results. “We can survive without search,” an anonymous source told the Washington Post at the time. However, Reddit seems to have realized in 2024 that life is much better with search.
And Google also knows the power of Reddit content. In mid-2023, Google got a preview of what search results would look like without Reddit.
In that year, massive blackouts on Reddit made waves. Over 8,000 subreddits went offline to protest against the platform’s planned API changes. The core issue was a significant increase in fees for accessing the API, which developers and third-party providers rely on to access Reddit data for their applications. This change particularly affected third-party app developers who depend on the API to offer alternative, often more user-friendly ways to access Reddit content.
Reddit argued that the increased costs were justified by the high operational expenses of the API services. CEO Steve Huffman emphasized that API usage served to cover costs and that data licensing represented a new potential revenue stream for Reddit. Critics, however, saw it primarily as an attempt to generate additional income without regard for the community’s impact.
On June 12, 2023, the large-scale protest began: thousands of subreddits either went private or went entirely offline to protest the planned changes. This move was intended to demonstrate the platform’s reach and importance and put pressure on Reddit to reconsider its decision. Particularly notable was that some of the largest and most active subreddits, such as r/funny, r/gaming, and r/music, were involved.
The blackouts led many users to find their favorite subreddits temporarily inaccessible. This collective action caused significant disruptions in Reddit usage and was a strong message to platform operators—and to Google, whose search results visibly suffered during the blackouts.
For many people, it has become a habit to add “reddit” to Google searches to get specific, community-vetted answers. A quick search in Semrush shows the high search volumes in Germany for the keyword “reddit.”
Conclusion and Future Outlook
Looking ahead, it remains to be seen how this partnership between Google and Reddit will impact the quality of search results and the overall user experience. It will be crucial for both Google and Reddit to strike a balance between monetization and maintaining the integrity of their platforms. Only in doing so can they ensure that users continue to receive trustworthy and high-quality information.
In general, Reddit should certainly be considered in any marketing strategy. Not only does the collaboration with Google and its influence on ChatGPT’s training data make Reddit a goldmine for marketers, but the platform’s vast reach and the ability to target niche interest groups provide significant opportunities for advertisers.
In terms of the broader online community, Reddit remains highly intriguing. The 2023 Reddit blackouts clearly demonstrated the power of digital communities and showed that users play a crucial role in shaping the future of the internet. This raises the question: will user engagement eventually be monetized? What would such a model look like? And if not, are further blackouts looming?
This situation is reminiscent of the ongoing battle between publishers and Google. Since the first ancillary copyright law was introduced in Germany in 2013, publishers have tried to secure compensation from Google for using their content, while Google has wielded its power by cutting off traffic to publishers who don’t agree to free usage of their content. So far, Google has emerged victorious from these disputes. However, the acquisition of Reddit highlights Google’s reliance on user-generated and user-curated content.
Could the balance of power on the internet eventually shift? As always, it remains exciting to watch.