Google Loves Reddit Now: What It Means for Your Website

If you have searched for anything remotely practical on Google in the past year — a product review, a troubleshooting guide, a “best X for Y” comparison — you will have noticed something. Reddit threads are everywhere. Not just scattered among the results, but often occupying multiple positions on the first page, sometimes above established authority sites that have spent years building their content.

This is not an accident, and it is not a temporary glitch. Google has deliberately changed its algorithms to favour forum content, user-generated content and short-form video. And a senior Google executive has said so publicly.

What Google actually said

Liz Reid, VP and head of Google Search, gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal’s “Bold Names” podcast in which she went considerably further than the usual corporate platitudes about quality and user experience. She admitted openly that Google has adjusted its ranking algorithms to surface more of certain types of content in response to what they have heard from users.

Reid described a behavioural shift: people, especially younger users, are no longer turning to “traditional sites” for many types of questions. They prefer short-form video, forums and user-generated content. The example she gave was simple but effective: where do you get your recipes from? A newspaper, or YouTube?

She also acknowledged something that anyone working in SEO already knew but rarely hears from Mountain View so candidly: every change to the algorithms creates winners and losers, and this is true of any ranking update.

There is a saying in Italian that we use quite often on our main site: “never ask the innkeeper if the wine is good.” We have always applied healthy scepticism to Google’s public statements. But this time, the data backs up the words. The traffic numbers are staggering and undeniable.

The numbers do not lie

According to data published by Sistrix, Reddit’s organic visibility in Google exploded during and after the March 2024 Core Update. Quora saw a similar trajectory. We are not talking about incremental gains — these were massive, unprecedented jumps in visibility.

At the same time, countless traditional websites — including many that had spent years carefully following Google’s own SEO guidance — saw their traffic plummet. The March 2024 Core Update, combined with a simultaneous spam update and a wave of manual actions, produced the most dramatic reshuffling of the SERPs that many SEO professionals had ever seen. The update took from 5 March to 19 April to complete — an unusually long rollout — and the changes it left behind were enormous.

The result is a new landscape where, for many informational queries, a Reddit thread written by an anonymous user with three upvotes can outrank a carefully researched, professionally written article on a domain with a decade of authority. This understandably frustrates many website owners and SEO practitioners. But there is a logic behind it, even if you disagree with the execution.

Why forums? Why now?

To understand Google’s reasoning, you need to understand the problem it was trying to solve.

For years, the SEO industry had been teaching people how to create content that ranked well on Google. The formula was well known: write a long, well-structured article on your target keyword, start from the historical origins of the topic (we call this the “Assyrian-Babylonian” approach in our Italian articles — every piece starts from ancient civilisation and methodically works its way to the present day), sprinkle in the right keywords, add proper headings, optimise for word count. The result was millions of articles that looked remarkably similar to each other: technically correct, well formatted, and utterly empty.

Then ChatGPT arrived, and the problem escalated dramatically. Suddenly, anyone could generate hundreds of these articles per day. The content was grammatically correct, structured according to SEO best practices, with keywords in all the right places. The only problem was that it was completely devoid of value. Well-written text without salt, as we like to say.

Google found itself drowning in a flood of content that its algorithms could not easily distinguish from the real thing — at least not at scale, not at reasonable cost. So it needed to find a signal for authenticity. And it found one in the places where authentic human conversation still happens: forums.

Forums have a characteristic that makes them particularly resistant to AI-generated content: they are conversations, not monologues. Someone asks a specific question. Someone else answers based on their personal experience. Others chime in with corrections, different opinions, additional details. It is a natural flow — often messy, sometimes repetitive, occasionally argumentative — but authentically human.

Many users had already figured this out on their own. In the months before the March 2024 update, a growing number of people had started adding “Reddit” to their search queries. They were looking for authentic content, real discussions, unfiltered opinions. They were looking, in other words, for what Google used to be good at finding but had increasingly struggled to surface from the ocean of optimised content.

Google noticed this behaviour and — in what might be either a stroke of genius or an act of desperation, depending on your perspective — decided to give users what they were already looking for.

The partnership nobody expected

It is worth noting that Google’s embrace of Reddit was not purely algorithmic. In early 2024, Google and Reddit struck a content licensing deal reportedly worth $60 million per year. This partnership gave Google deeper access to Reddit’s content for AI training purposes and, not coincidentally, was followed by Reddit’s dramatically increased visibility in search results.

Whether the deal directly influenced the rankings is something only Google knows for certain. What we can observe is that the timing was remarkably convenient.

The problem with the solution

Google’s approach has not been without criticism, and quite rightly so. Several legitimate concerns have been raised by SEO professionals and website owners.

Reddit threads are not moderated to the same standard as professional content. They can contain misinformation, outdated advice, promotional spam disguised as genuine recommendations, and outright manipulation. As Lily Ray, a well-known SEO consultant, pointed out on X: for health-related queries, Google is now placing a “Discussions and Forums” carousel above E-E-A-T-compliant medical results, while Reddit is visibly being overrun by affiliate spam and scammers.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, responded by arguing that users actively seek out forum content and appreciate seeing it in search results. His point has some merit — for many practical queries, a real user’s experience is genuinely more useful than a generic article. But the lack of quality control remains a serious concern.

There is also an ironic twist to the whole situation. Now that Reddit threads rank so well on Google, the platform is rapidly filling up with exactly the kind of low-quality, commercially motivated content that Google was trying to avoid. Marketers, affiliates and SEO practitioners have descended on Reddit with predictable enthusiasm, and the quality of many subreddits is noticeably declining as a result.

Google may have found a temporary signal for authenticity, but that signal is already being gamed.

What this means for your website

At this point you may be wondering: should we all just abandon our websites and move to Reddit?

The answer is obviously no. But there are several practical lessons worth drawing from this situation.

Do not panic, but do adapt

If your website has lost traffic since the March 2024 update, the cause may not be anything you did wrong. Google has fundamentally shifted the balance of what it shows in search results, and traditional content sites are bearing the brunt of that shift. The good news is that this situation is unlikely to be permanent in its current extreme form. Google has a history of overcorrecting and then pulling back. The bad news is that the direction of travel — more weight on authentic, experience-based content — is almost certainly permanent.

Make your content impossible to replicate

The articles that are losing to Reddit threads tend to be the ones that could have been written by anyone (or by an AI). They contain correct information, properly structured, but nothing that distinguishes them from a hundred similar articles on the same topic.

The articles that are holding their positions — and in some cases gaining ground — are the ones that offer something a forum thread cannot: structured expertise combined with genuine experience, presented in a way that is comprehensive yet accessible.

Ask yourself: does your content contain observations, data, examples or perspectives that could only come from someone who has actually done the thing they are writing about? If the answer is no, you are vulnerable.

Consider enabling and encouraging user-generated content

Comments, reviews, testimonials, Q&A sections — these are all forms of user-generated content that can enrich your website with authentic human voices. Many sites disabled comments years ago to avoid spam and moderation headaches. It might be time to reconsider.

An article with twenty thoughtful comments debating, expanding on or challenging what you wrote is worth considerably more — both to users and to search engines — than the same article sitting in silence.

Participate in your industry’s communities

If forums, subreddits or discussion groups exist in your sector, consider participating in them as part of your broader content strategy. Not with blatant self-promotion, but with genuine contributions: answering questions, sharing experience, engaging with the community. This builds authority, creates visibility and — perhaps most importantly — keeps you in touch with what your potential customers actually want to know.

Focus on what forums cannot do

Forums excel at specific, experience-based answers. They are far less effective at providing comprehensive, well-structured overviews of complex topics. Your website content should aim for a space that Reddit cannot easily occupy: deep expertise, clear structure, regularly updated information, professional quality.

A well-written guide that synthesises dozens of forum discussions into a coherent, actionable resource will always have value — provided it genuinely adds something beyond what those individual discussions already contain.

The bigger picture

What we are witnessing is not really about Reddit or forums. It is about authenticity. Google is struggling — as we all are — to find the genuine human voice in an ocean of machine-generated text. Forums happen to be one of the few remaining environments where that voice is still reliably present.

The underlying message for anyone who runs a website is clear: the era of content created primarily for search engines is ending. The era of content created primarily for people — with real experience, genuine expertise and something original to say — is just beginning.

Or perhaps, more accurately, it is returning. Before the age of SEO formulas and AI content mills, the web was full of people writing about things they genuinely knew and cared about. We may be heading back in that direction. And honestly, that would not be a bad thing at all.

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