Has Reddit’s traffic really quadrupled in 6 months?

DisOne@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 395 points – ‘Quality Of Google Search Crashed’ – Concerns As Reddit’s Traffic Nearly Quadruples In Six Months
bandt.com.au

If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?

125

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it's showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.

I'm assuming "traffic" here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a "how do I do X" type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I'm sure that's not how Reddit will spin it.

This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.

I see more and more suggested "my search Reddit" on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now

I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with 'reddit' keyword... (just based on my impression, though)

I honesty can't search a damn thing and not have Reddit be the first result. I basically been using AI over search to fix things... probably as intended.

That or google bought a lot of shares ahead if IPO.

There are search addons able to filter out specific sites, if you'd like it.

A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit...

Not saying its bad info sometimes. There's a reason most of us used reddit. It just seems like its the new SEO optimized background noise now. It's not what I'm looking for, and I rather avoid the site now.

Yes and no. No, it's not Reddit doing it. Yes, Google is strongly favoring reddit results. They are combating AI content in this manner.

Google searches are becoming worthless more and more. This may be the beginning of the end for them unless users quickly adopt their generative search approach when they release it.