By: Kavan Sohal Mar 24/2025
For those in the Search industry, specifically the SEO industry, it’s well-known that we’ve felt like we’ve been on a roller-coaster ride over the past two years. We’ve had the search engine results page (SERPs) evolve considerably since the advent of Chat-GPT in late 2023.
One of the bigger changes outside of the AI overviews and AI engines like Chat-GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. is the growing prominence of Reddit in the SERPs. This is demonstrated by Reddit’s visibility in commercial queries jumping from 68th to 5th position among U.S. domains within a single year [1][11]. That’s not just growth – it’s domination.
What Is Reddit?
If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it is a social media platform more akin to a forum than uncategorized newsfeeds like Facebook or Instagram. Think of it like an online community for basically any topic you want. Users can ask questions or post opinions and get responses from any other Reddit user. It has a community of over 330 million monthly active users. It’s important due to the vast amount of user-generated content.
Why Has Reddit Grown So Much?
The answer lies in a mixture of: a messy internet with too much spam, a lack of quality answers, and people preferring several real opinions from “real” people vs. just the 1 opinion hidden under a multitude of fluff information. For example, when you are looking to get a recipe for a new dish, you have to first scroll through the same kind of filler information about how it’s a family recipe they used to have while they were growing up, the background to each ingredient etc. before getting to the actual recipe. This is the same across most recipes which is why there is a market for apps like Just The Recipe. Whereas on Reddit, it’s likely the first comment to a question. The rise of misinformation across the internet has also contributed to mistrust in the content websites publish. This leads me to believe that we are entering an era of more skeptical internet users. Can we trust the opinion of websites that are putting out content just to obtain rankings in the SERPs?
If you’re a content creator, marketer, or business owner trying to gain more visibility in search, you need to understand this shift. The blog content you’ve spent countless hours on might be getting outranked by Reddit threads where someone asks a similar question and gets 10+ responses. Your carefully crafted product pages might be losing to subreddit discussions where people are looking for real use cases and experiences vs one particular reviewer. This isn’t just a temporary blip – it’s a fundamental change in how Google values content and it doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. This is akin to a platform like Rotten Tomatoes and other similar review aggregators coming in and upending the review game.
Why has Google made such a significant change? It appears that users have been adding “Reddit” to their search queries with enough volume for Google to want to make that shift. I’ll admit that I often add Reddit to the end of all my searches because I want real user opinions and to compare a number of differing viewpoints rather than content that may be influenced by companies sponsoring it to push their products.
A second reason is that Reddit signed a $60 million/year deal with Google to access their data, from which they are also training their AI models [3][5]. While Google officially denies giving Reddit any direct ranking benefits, the numbers tell a different story.
Here’s what we’re seeing:
- 49.4% of search results with AI Overviews now include Reddit content (despite only 0.056% explicitly citing Reddit as a source) [7]
- Reddit is ranking for 97% of product review queries (often outranking the actual product creators) [5][10]
- 42% of users now deliberately append “Reddit” to commercial queries when looking for authentic reviews [5][11]
This isn’t happening randomly. It’s most noticeable in specific categories:
- High-intent product research queries – “best CRM software” or “is iPhone 16 worth upgrading”
- Experience-based questions – “what happens during wisdom teeth removal” or “how to deal with difficult coworkers”
- Troubleshooting and solutions – anything technical where people share real fixes (much easier than navigating the often confusing help documentation for systems like Microsoft)
- Niche topics with limited commercial content – specialized hobbies, rare medical conditions, etc.
Through all of this, many websites are seeing 15-30% traffic declines as Reddit discussions displace their content [5][10]. That’s not a small dip – it’s potentially business-altering.
Why Else Reddit is Winning the Search Game
Google has been pushing its E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) for years now and it’s a big part of their Quality Rater Guidelines. Reddit inherently demonstrates these qualities:
Experience: All posts are technically first-hand user accounts and personal experiences [5][14]
Expertise: There are specialized subreddits (r/AskHistorians, r/legaladvice) with verified experts and sometimes not-so-verified experts [5][14]
Authoritativeness: Reddit has established a dominant domain authority through the links that it gets [7]
Trustworthiness: According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, 68% of millennials trust forum opinions over brand content [5][13]
Beyond the E-E-A-T alignment, several other factors are working in Reddit’s favour:
- There are 12.5 million active communities generating constant fresh discussions. This means that Reddit content is always up-to-date [7][13]. Static blog posts can’t compete with real-time conversations that contain hundreds of threads and answers.
- Reddit conversations use natural language patterns that mirror how people actually search (“Has anyone tried…” or “What’s your experience with…”) [9][14]. This aligns perfectly with voice search and long-tail keywords as well as the way that we converse with AI tools like ChatGPT.
How Have People Been Using Reddit for SEO?
Leveraging Reddit for SEO requires a unique strategic approach. We’ve summarized some options below:
Native Reddit Content Development
Instead of trying to drive traffic from Reddit to your site, become part of the community:
- Find Your Subreddit Niche: Communities like r/SaaS or r/ecommerce have 60% verified professionals [13]. These aren’t just random internet users – they’re your target audience.
- AMAs and Expertise Sharing: If you’re genuinely knowledgeable, host “Ask Me Anything” sessions with verifiable credentials.
Technical SEO Adjustments
Yes, you can still do technical SEO with Reddit in mind:
- Implement Reddit-specific schema: This helps search engines understand the relationship between your content and related discussions.
- Canonicalization Strategies: When repurposing Reddit content for blogs, use rel=canonical tags pointing to original threads to avoid duplicate content penalties [8][16].
SERP-Centric Engagement
If you can’t beat them, join them:
- Find Ranking Threads: Use tools like STAT to identify existing Reddit threads that are already ranking for your target keywords. Then participate meaningfully in those discussions [13].
- Strategic Commenting: Follow the 70/30 rule – 70% genuine contribution, 30% contextual product mentions. A study of 500 SaaS companies found this approach yields 0.8% conversion rates from Reddit referrals [12]. Not huge, but not terrible either.
Adjust Your On-Site Content Strategies
Improve your own content generation by leveraging Reddit:
- Database Content: Remember how I used Rotten Tomatoes as an example previously? People love this kind of content as well as listicles and they may use you use a source for Reddit responses if you have something similar.
- Unique Content: Provide your website visitors and potential visitors with unique content they can’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s specific legal advice or the top 10 places for sushi in your city or neighbourhood. There are plenty of helpful content pieces that people may not have answered yet or that you can provide specific expert advice on. Don’t just write content for the sake of writing content that others have already covered. Usually, people are more likely to trust advice from an expert or business they can trust and is local to them.
- Answer Unanswered Niche Reddit Questions: Sometimes there are questions with poor answers or without answers in Reddit. Those are perfect niche topics to write about. If one person is asking it, you know another will, too.
- Look For Common Questions: If you work for a company that’s big enough to have a subreddit about your product, look for the top questions asked about your product, these may be opportunities to improve your help documentation.
Future Outlook and Contingency Planning
With all this being said, one thing I’ve learned in SEO is never to get too comfortable with any one strategy. Reddit’s dominance could expand further or contract dramatically. Smart marketers are preparing for both scenarios by mixing in strategies like:
What To Do About Reddit
The Reddit-Google symbiosis and changes to SERP makeup represent both an opportunity and a challenge for SEOs, content writers, and website owners. While Reddit currently enjoys algorithmic favour, recent volatility shows that its dominance isn’t set in stone.
The winners in this new landscape will be those who:
- Genuinely engage in communities rather than just trying to extract traffic from them.
- Adapt their content strategies to complement rather than compete with forum discussions.
- Stay agile as this still-evolving relationship between search engines and community platforms continues to develop.
As Steve Huffman of Reddit noted during the Q4 2024 earnings call: “Search visibility fluctuates, but communities endure.” [4][7] Maybe that’s the real lesson here: build for people first, algorithms second.
What’s your experience been with Reddit and search? Have you seen your content displaced by Reddit threads? We can help you develop an SEO strategy that is tailored to your own niche needs.
Sources & References
[1] Blog Vs Forum – Organic Traffic Question : r/SEO – Reddit
[3] Reddit SEO Hacks: Fast SERP Growth Using The Internet’s Front Page
[4] Reddit Blames Google Algorithm Changes For Not Hitting User Growth
[5] The State of Reddit and Google’s Partnership in 2025
[6] What are the most effective strategies for creating a blogging …
[7] Reddit Domain Analysis – Growth, Valuation, Competitors, and Stability
[8] How to optimize your blog’s site structure for SEO [2025]
[9] SEO is easy. The EXACT process we use to scale our clients’ SEO …
[10] I got 15% decrease in organic traffic for just 1 Week – Reddit
[11] Reddit: Converging SEO and Social Media for B2B Marketers
[12] How to improve my organic search other than writing blogs? : r/SaaS
[13] How To Prepare For The Rise Of AIO & Reddit For SEO
[14] 10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post – Yoast
Banner Image created from Screenshot taken from Reddit
About the Author
Kavan Sohal