Reddit’s traffic is increasing. It can thank Google.

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer

Reddit’s first year as a publicly traded company is going well. The company, which is nearly 20 years old, shared a extremely strong earnings report this week: Revenue is up 68 percent year-over-year, daily active unique visitors are up 47 percent, a Reddit turned a profit for the first time in its history. Earnings exceeded analysts’ expectations, and the share price shot up more than 40 percent.

Reddit had no shortage of other great numbers to share. Advertising revenue rose 56 percent year-over-year to $315 million, while “other” revenue, mainly from AI licensing deals, rose 547 percent to $33 million, a figure that’s relatively small but greatly contributes to the company’s profitability. Its turnover per per user has also increased slightly, meaning visits are being more efficiently monetized on average. After years of slow growth and a stubborn inability to make money despite its size and influence, Reddit is blowing up.

Reddit’s growth and trajectory are undeniable. In its news release and letter to investorsbut they are also somewhat underexplained. Why can a mature, mostly unchanged platform suddenly start growing like a viral start-up? (Reddit’s last quarterly report included corresponding eye-popping growth numbers.) The company suggests a number of factors — machine translation to localize content for new markets, better posting interfaces and tools for users — but ends up talking about the obvious answer: Google, the most popular website in the world and by far the largest traffic referrer on the Internet , sending more people to Reddit. Much more.

The backstory here is a bit murky and contested, but the basic outline is this: Late last year, Google began prioritizing certain sources of user-generated content in Search in an effort to show more “first person perspectives” in response to queries. This, among other less clearly explained changes, seemed to result in more visibility for forum-like sites like Quora and especially Reddit, which some users already added to queries as a sort of hack to improve search results (“best iphone battery reddit,” for example).

It also resulted in a massive drop in traffic for a number of online publishers, caught the attention of Google analysts and search engine optimization (SEO) experts, and sent waves of panic through online media outlets that rely heavily on Google to find readers. “Reddit’s rise is unprecedented,” says Lily Raya VP at the marketing consultancy Amsive. “We’ve never seen anything like this in the SEO space.” Between July and August 2023, Ray says, Reddit “really started to take off” in terms of visibility across thousands of popular searches. Now, for informational searches—a term of art that refers to queries where the user has a specific question to answer—”you’ll see reddit.com rank at the top.” (Among web publishers and SEO experts, there is a widespread belief that this change is related to Google’s AI licensing agreement with Reddit, which was announced earlier this year; the companies refuse that the two are related.)

The source of Reddit’s growth is also evident in its official numbers, though it doesn’t specifically break out Google or search traffic. For example, its logged daily active-unique visitors increased by 27 percent globally, while its logged-out the daily number of active unique visitors has increased by 70 percent. In Q3 of last year, logged in users accounted for a slight majority of daily unique visits to Reddit; this year, logged visitors have taken the lead. This is consistent with growth driven by people clicking on Reddit links in Google rather than organic growth from people specifically searching for Reddit.

In his letter to investors, CEO Steve Huffman mentions how important Reddit has become to Google — “Reddit was the sixth most Googled word in the U.S.,” he notes — but is somewhat more oblique about how important Google has become to Reddit. This is as close as he gets (bold mine):

Looking forward, improving the search experience on Reddit is a key part of our strategy. We want to ensure that all users get the best possible experience. This includes users coming to Reddit from external search and those who search Reddit directly, looking for recommendations on what to buy, what to see, or which products or services are the best. We know that many users are looking for more than just answers; they’re looking for authentic insight and real-world advice from the communities on Reddit. We’re focused on making the experience of navigating conversations and content on Reddit easier and more intuitive.

Again, Reddit is doing well, and getting lots of new visitors, some of whom will become active users and contributors to the platform, making it more useful and valuable, is good news in more ways than one. But getting the majority of your traffic—your primary source of revenue as an ad-supported business—from a much larger partner isn’t without its risks. Just ask the sites that just saw their former visitors being redirected to Reddit a lot. Or the collapsing American news media!

Reddit built its reputation as a community of communities, a site where people intentionally spend time and occasionally contribute in the form of posts, conversations, or voluntary moderation. Its users were motivated by the presence of other users; related to this, for better or worse, the company had to be at least somewhat responsive to the demands of Redditors, on whom it depended both for ad revenue and as a source of free content and labor. (In the lead-up to its IPO, however, Reddit ran out of patience with this dynamic and asserted its authority over a restless mod community.) If Reddit begins to function more as a de facto expanding Google – as a website full of highly searchable content rather than a largely self-contained community – it will have to deal with different challenges.

Already, spammers trying to take advantage of Reddit’s visibility in Google pumps the site full of fake and often AI-generated”parasite SEO” content, creating new work for already beleaguered volunteer moderators. In 2007, Demand Media, a company that existed to get Google traffic, rode a a mutually beneficial arrangement with the search engine at a valuation that briefly exceeded New York’s Times. Demand Media was a rather cynical content farm that paid freelancers small fees to produce massive amounts of acceptable search fodder that briefly filled gaps in Google’s results pages. Reddit, which could not be more different in terms of history, its role within the wider web, and its relationship with its users, nevertheless finds itself performing a similar function and achieving similar benefits. That’s not a bad deal! But it’s potentially risky, especially now that Reddit is denying indexing from other search engines with ties to AI companies, which is pretty much all of them.

Reddit’s newfound success is at the mercy of Google, in other words, a fact both companies are keenly aware of: If the search giant decides to start showing fewer Reddit links, or perhaps starts summarizing more of them with artificial intelligence – it paid for access to all that data, after all — the company’s wild growth could stall or reverse, which is a bit more of a problem now that it has a ticker symbol.

Reddit’s current task is to try to convert its new traffic into users who stick around, talk to each other, and keep producing enough actually credible, interesting, or useful content to keep other users around — but also for Google to harvest and advertise against. For years, Reddit had to answer to its investors and its users whose wishes were not always aligned. Now it must be the equivalent of the most powerful website on the Internet.