Google And Reddit: Exploring The ‘Symbiotic Relationship’
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am a Reddit shareholder / marketer with a predisposition for the company to do well.
On Reddit’s last quarterly earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman described the relationship between Google and Reddit as ‘symbiotic’.
His comments followed an 18-month period in which Google has transformed its search results to place Reddit front and centre of its organic listings.
It’s now estimated Google sends over one billion users to Reddit every month.
And from Google’s side, in their partnership announcement in early 2024 they referenced ‘a longstanding relationship with Reddit for many years’.
But the key questions for me – exactly what is Google getting out of this ‘deepening partnership’? And will it be enough to stop them turning off the tap?
What is this ‘longstanding relationship’?
Obviously there’s a lot we don’t know and we probably never will.
But in simple terms I believe the current dynamic Reddit’s leadership are describing:
- Reddit has given Google access to its corpus of data via its API, allowing them to use this data to train their AI models (Gemini)
- Google is paying Reddit roughly $60m per year for access
But was this boost in organic visibility part of the deal – or something else entirely?
Just how much traffic is Google sending Reddit?
The recent growth in organic traffic to Reddit isn’t some mild tweak of Google’s algorithm in Reddit’s favour. It’s unprecedented.
I’ve worked in search almost 15 years and in that time I’ve never seen one site gain so much organic traffic in such a short period of time.
I think the chart above (estimated Google traffic to Reddit) says much of what you need to know – but to put it into perspective using SEMRush data:
- Reddit’s estimated search traffic in the 18 months since July 2023 has grown from 178 million to 1.27 billion – a 613% increase.
- Reddit is now ranking for 4x as many keywords worldwide in Google search, from 106m in July 2023 to 409m today.
- Where Reddit had 4.3m keywords in the top 3 positions of Google in July 2023, they now have 29.9m – a 595% increase.
The upshot is Reddit now sits third in the list of websites that receive the most organic traffic from Google in the United States.
Only Wikipedia and YouTube (another Alphabet property) receive more.
Every day, millions of users are discovering the practical value of Reddit’s communities thanks to Google.
Reddit’s growth tracks with the emergence of generative AI
It’s easy to look at the timing of the deal between Google and Reddit and surmise that this growth is the result of some shady backroom deal.
And we’ll probably never know if that is the case.
But there is another dynamic at play that tracks with the wider Google ecosystem and the factors Google rely on to rank websites in the modern era.
The recent emergence of generative AI meant a proliferation of low-quality, spammy content on the internet.
And since Google’s Antitrust trial we’ve known Google is actually pretty bad at evaluating the quality of webpages.
This slide was taken from their Antitrust trial with the DoJ:
Instead of analysing documents, often Google relies on how its users interact with pages and websites in its search results to inform where they should rank:
In simple terms without getting too technical: Google uses interaction signals like clicks to inform which sites are preferred by users – if a site gets more clicks than expected in its search results, it’s likely to be featured more prominently.
And there is one particular interaction signal Google’s search engineers have leant into (more than any other) over the last few years…
Google over-weighting brand
How Google calculates ‘brand’ isn’t known exactly, but it’s widely considered to be some mixture of:
- Users searching your brand name in Google (‘reddit’)
- Users searching relevant keywords + your brand name in Google (‘best credit cards reddit’)
- Backlinks pointing to your website (and brand mentions on authoritative websites)
And those first two factors in particular have been dialled way up in the last few years.
My own personal opinion is that this is a flawed weighting and the main reason Google results have been getting a lot of bad feedback recently.
There are many reasons users might search a brand – and not all of them are positive.
And since Google is also terrible at geotargeting, it has meant websites in more populous countries like India (with many users searching on their brand) have been outperforming more relevant businesses local to you.
But that’s another topic I could write a whole article on.
So why is this so significant for Reddit?
Google searchers appending ‘Reddit’ to their queries
Here’s another snippet from Steve Huffman from their last quarterly earnings call:
So I think if you look within the Google traffic, there’s a couple of big classes of users that I think are important to recognize. So the first are people who go to Google with the intention of ending up on Reddit. So in that stat I mentioned in my opening remarks, we’re seeing a lot of those users. Reddit is the sixth most searched word on Google in the U.S. this year. And so those are people literally typing the word Reddit into Google. So they know they’re going to end up on it. They’re using, in this case, Google to navigate Reddit.
This has been going on for some time now.
Googlers appending ‘Reddit’ to their search query has been reported by users as far back as 2019 – and has received some very prominent attention, including even acknowledgement from Google itself.
Whether this is an expression of user frustration at the quality of Google’s search results, or as a vote of confidence in Reddit is debateable – personally I think it’s something of a mix between the two.
But the upshot is that so long as Google continues to rely so heavily on brand as a ranking signal, Reddit will continue to perform well in Google.
In the post generative AI era, Google clearly don’t feel they’ve found any credible alternative.
And this is a long-term trend towards brand signals which they don’t appear keen to change – even in the face of mounting criticism at the quality of their search results.
Could Google pull the plug on Reddit?
Yes – absolutely.
To quote directly from Steve Huffman and that earnings transcript:
“It’s true, the algorithm does kind of come and go, give us and take us away, as you say. So you’ll never hear us celebrate or complain about an algorithm change here. But at the end of the day, Reddit has great content. It has answers to questions. It has advice and perspectives that people are looking for, and that’s what Internet consumers want, whether they’re coming directly to Reddit or finding us through other means.”
So they appear cautiously optimistic that Google will continue to reward Reddit because they have the advice and perspectives people are looking for.
Steve didn’t say it directly but perhaps the feeling is that Google historically hasn’t rewarded Reddit quite as much as they maybe should have.
And if that is the case, then we might expect that at least a good amount of the increased visibility is here to stay, even if there is some pullback from the current levels.
But Google giveth and it taketh away – it always remains a risk.
Are all of Reddit’s eggs in one basket?
In a word – yes.
In terms of new users being referred to Reddit, it’s clear that Google is the most important source.
In fact, plotting Reddit’s user growth against its search visibility paints a clear picture:
Until Google’s recent changes, user growth on Reddit was fairly static.
If there’s one thing that makes me feel a little uneasy as a Reddit marketer it’s the volatility of Google and Reddit’s dependence on the Google algorithm for user growth.
The volatility of Google’s algorithm
Ultimately Google continues to hold a vice-like grip over the open web.
Having worked in web publishing, I’ve experienced first-hand the devastation when Google decides you’re no longer valued in its ecosystem.
I’m not being hyperbolic in stating that Google’s monopoly on search means their algorithm literally decides which businesses get to live or die.
And the increasing difficulty is you have to view Google’s algorithm updates through the lens of more than just the interest of its users.
Evidence from its DoJ case has shown Google is even prepared to sacrifice the quality of its own search results in the pursuit of earnings.
So the worry is that even if users want Reddit, Google might only continue to send users their way if there is a clear benefit to Google in doing so.
Until we understand more clearly what that benefit is in the ‘symbiotic relationship’, as a Redditor I will always have one eye on their Google visibility and its direction of travel.
It’s uncertain traffic, but powerful while you have it
As long as Reddit continues to get this much traffic from Google, I’m very bullish about the platform’s prospects for growth.
My own personal opinion (for what it’s worth) is that Reddit were suppressed for a long time in Google search, despite offering a lot of value to users.
The rebalancing feels somewhat overweighted, but it would surely be a disservice to their users if Google didn’t continue to reward Reddit with increased visibility, given the sheer number of users actively searching them out in Google search.
I expect that if this current cycle in Google ends and Reddit’s visibility does fall back somewhat, it should still feature prominently based on its value for users.
As it stands right now, Google search needs Reddit to be functional.
And as long as they do, Reddit should continue to grow their user base at an accelerated rate.
But my gut feeling with what Google will change next in its algorithm has been wrong before.
