I loveReddit . You believably do too .
But increasingly , you may have noticed it gaining more swelling than you ’d expect a simple forum to receive . It ’s all over the news , and certainly all over your Google Search results — quietly belong from a fledgling forum born in the net ’s awkward teen years to the most important backbone of Google Search . more and more , it ’s becoming an important part of the time to come of the internet too , thanks to AI .
There might be more to the account , though , than just born constitutive outgrowth of a popular platform . Perhaps it ’s worth remembering that old internet adage — if you ’re not a paying client , youarethe customer .
Google suddenly loves Reddit
We have some new data on the more and more blotto relationship between Reddit and Google Search .
According toSimilarweb , Reddit dealings from Google has reportedly increase by 50 % just since September of 2023 . Meanwhile , as of June 2024 , Google now represents 60 % of its overall traffic , with just a third of its traffic coming directly from reddit.com .
This is no coincidence , of course . According to the news report , this increase in traffic is thanks to hoi polloi upend the word “ reddit ” to searches , such as “ Elden Ringreddit . ” You may have notice this behavior in yourself in effort to skip past the hordes of optimize articles slathered in ads in hopes of finding a simple answer to your motion . This is also a way for people to arrive at a subreddit rather than go to reddit.com .
Of course , this is n’t the only understanding for the huge excrescence in traffic . This report does n’t point out on it , but Google has also recently begin to elevate Reddit and other meeting place in searches . The“expanded partnership ” with Redditwas announced in February of 2024 , bring up visibility with “ substance - forward show of Reddit information . ” At the time , Google praised Reddit as play “ a unique role on the open internet ” and for offering an “ incredible breadth of veritable , human conversation and experiences . ”
short after , it became clear thatReddit posts were being travel upand extremely range , often above firsthand author and reputable sites . Reddit alsorecently choke up out other search enginesfrom creep its land site , only approving paying collaborator like Google . Suffice to say , Reddit and Google are more interlinked than ever , and that does n’t look to be changing anytime presently .
Now , you might be thinking that Google Search does n’t constitute the internet as a whole , which you ’d surely be right about . But if you view AI the next phylogenesis of lookup , Reddit is playing an even bigger role there .
AI built on Reddit
The goal of AI chatbots is to sound as much like a human as possible , and to do that , it needs records of conversations . Lotsof them . Meta has Facebook and Instagram datato string from for its open - source Llama models , whileGrok is pull from X(formerly Twitter ) . But the two biggest players in the game , OpenAI and Google , do n’t have those same treasure trove of human interaction to prepare with .
That ’s where Reddit comes in .
In February , theme indicate that Google was paying$60 million to train its Gemini modelson Reddit data . In lineal substantiation of this , when Google roll out its sloppy introduction ofAI Overviews , it sometimes directly quoted Reddit posts — to sometimes hilarious results . OpenAI followed that upjust a couple of months later with its own deal with Reddit , cementing its role in the two elemental chatbots . It ’s worth noting that OpenAI is also make for on its own search engine , which will most certainly use Reddit as an important barometer .
As a third - party reference of recorded human conversations , the conversation on Reddit are certainly being bake into the pie of AI language poser . tie the dots , it ’s not a reach to assume that Google has some ulterior motive by prop up Reddit across Search .
Of naturally , I ca n’t say for sure that the pauperism to train Gemini is the lone reason for Google to favour it in search results . For now , at least , Google Search , remains the gumption of the company for now . And I can see the value in elevating user - based forum in some instances , especially since Google has data to imply that people desire it as a source of entropy .
But Icansay this : as much as Google wants us to conceive it makes algorithm change for the benefit of users and individual websites , it ’s undeniable that its AI model is benefitting by pushing more traffic to Reddit . In possibility , the more traffic it feeds to Reddit , the more data it will have to train Gemini with .
Google need Reddit to keep thriving , and it just so happens to have the power to do just that .
