Is Google Eating Reddit?

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer

Reddit’s massive growth in recent years has a clear primary cause: Google. The backstory is relatively simple. Reddit is full of communities with posts made by real people. Google is a search engine that’s supposed to find you information on the web. The problem is that the web is dying, or at least filling with garbage and slop, in no small part because of its economic entanglement with Google, the largest advertising company in the world.

The web outside of Reddit is increasingly full of stuff created to game Google while skimming a few ad dollars off the top; it’s been overharvested to all hell, and its soil is depleting. Within Reddit, users for the most part publish things for other Reddit users: answers to questions, but also jokes, arguments, and straightforward descriptions of various things. Is Reddit a centralized, privately owned web within a web, representing a tragic, pseudo-democratic enclosure of the commons? Yes. Is it a crucial island in a sea of slop, the health of which is vital to the broader usability of the internet? Yes.

For years, adding “reddit” to search queries has been a useful trick; now it’s both common practice and to some extent done automatically, as Google and Reddit have formalized their relationship. In October of last year, after a newly public Reddit reported massive growth in users and revenue, we found clear evidence of Google’s influence in the company’s coy reporting:

For example, its logged-in daily active-unique-visitor numbers are up 27 percent globally, while its logged-out daily active-unique-visitor numbers are up 70 percent. In Q3 of last year, logged-in users accounted for a slim majority of daily unique visits to Reddit; this year, logged-out visitors have taken the lead. This is consistent with growth driven by people tapping on Reddit links in Google rather than organic growth from people seeking out Reddit specifically.

Reddit had become Google’s favorite site. Reddit was getting more users, but especially more casual users, who were less likely to contribute to the platform; it was also attracting more parties interested in leveraging Reddit’s Google visibility for profit.

Reddit was and is still functioning fine, but it’s clearly being harvested by Google, for which the platform is straightforwardly and massively valuable. Reddit makes Google work better, but all those billions of searches that end up guiding people to the platform posts are almost certainly better monetized by ad-laden Google than by Reddit itself.

Last week, Reddit reported major growth again, but not quite as much as expected. This led to a sell-off. In his letter to investors, Reddit’s CEO was more candid about the underlying dynamic:

Later in Q4, we experienced some volatility with Google Search triggered by a periodic algorithm change, but traffic from search has recovered so far in Q1, and we’ve regained momentum. What happened wasn’t unusual—referrals from search fluctuate from time to time, and they primarily affect logged-out users. Our teams have navigated numerous algorithm updates and did an excellent job adapting to these latest changes effectively. This particular swing was interesting, though, because we saw a corresponding increase in the query term “reddit,” which suggests users are searching with the specific intent of reaching Reddit, and this propensity continues to rise.

Again, the overall situation here is still pretty good for Reddit: Google is funneling huge numbers of people into a product that makes money on ads and depends on a steady supply of new users to create content for free. But it’s not hard to imagine how such an arrangement can go wrong. You don’t have to: After years of mutually beneficial (but somewhat more lopsided) arrangements, many publishers have seen Google traffic decline precipitously and, with the implementation of Google’s AI search answers, are at least considering the possibility of Google traffic eventually going to zero.

Reddit is a bit different, of course. It’s much bigger than any one publisher, and its content is extremely cheap to produce — that is, it’s mostly made, organized, and moderated by volunteers who like Reddit. Still, Google is both a major benefactor and a source of large and growing risk to its continued health and operation, and it has a lot more to lose. Reddit’s leadership is clearly aware of this. In its letter, the company introduced two euphemistic terms: scrollers and seekers, which are approximately actual users and people from Google, respectively. In an effort to hold onto more seekers, the company introduced a product called Reddit Answers, which is a searchlike AI chatbot interface for Reddit:

Photo: Reddit

Will people use this instead of typing “best running earbuds Reddit” into Google? Maybe. The company will want to know soon: Google is already experimenting with including Reddit results — including misrepresented jokes — into its own AI answers, which hardly send people to websites at all.