Google’s shoving Reddit down your throat - here’s why

Have you noticed Google kinda sucks now???

Instead of detailed answers from reputable sources, your Google search now ends up with a Reddit rabbit hole of snarky-armchair-experts sharing their slightly-argumentative word vomit. (Yes, written in slightly-argumentative word vomit on purpose. Next time, I'll write in TikTok brain rot.)

It’s not just you.?

For the past few months, Reddit's taken over the top (or really close to the top) of Google search results.?

According to Reddit conspiracy theorists, apparently the most reputable news sources in 2024, this top-of-Google Reddit placement is intentional.

Allegedly... In exchange for access to Reddit's "human generated content," Google slapped Reddit at the top of search results to generate more Reddit site visits and more potential Reddit users to create event more human generated content to train AI bots.

Instead of improving search by making it easier to find valuable content, Google and Reddit line their pockets while users struggle to find any shred of usefulness from the top search engine.

Of course, Google says they're making the platform better, but there’s a pretty interesting sequence of events that make the conspiracy feel true. Let's look at the facts:

It’s no secret Google ain’t as hot as it used to be.?

• GenZ has moved to Tiktok and Instagram for their search needs preferring visual content (not-so-secretly, I have too.)
• Google’s market share is at the lowest it’s ever been.
• Bing is on the come up, slowly eating Google’s lunch. (Google's still the reigning champ, but that lead is slipping!)

If there was ever a time for an under-the-table deal Hail Mary to get back on top, this is the time.?

In Feb 2024, Google announced their partnership with Reddit to use their “human generated content” as training data for their new AI language model.?

In TikTok brain rot, Google’s AI bot sounds like a rizz-less NPC so Google dropped $60M on Real Humans of Reddit training bootcamp for their precious AI baby. (I knew I'd find a chance to squeeze it in!)

A few weeks later, Google’s core update rolled out, changing how websites are selected and ordered in search - and the only functional update was putting Reddit at the top of search.?

An audit by BBC showed many major publishers saw traffic drops between 50-90% after the update while Reddit search traffic grew by 126%.?

This happens a few weeks before Reddit goes public.

I’m sure it’s all a coincidence… though it just feels a little too perfect, doesn't it?

To learn the truth, I dug into the backstory of Google,?AI and Reddit (only the relevant stuff) to give you a full picture of what happened and put an unbiased answer to the question…

Conspiracy or na??

The Sh*ttification of Search

Google search has become that boyfriend you want to break up with but you haven’t found a new beau yet.?

You’re not the only one googling the new new reason to be upset about inflation 2024 and getting hit in the face with AI-generated slop, contradictory reddit threads and so many Temu shopping links you want to barf like a billionaire.?

In the early days of the internet, google was the holy grail. As a user, we could trust that that first link at the top of google would answer our question. Maybe we had to click down to the second link but we rarely had to look further than that.

Google knew what articles were the best because smart site owners were using SEO - search engine optimization.?

That’s the process of making your articles thorough, helpful, well researched, scannable, and of course, have the right keywords throughout.?

For example, an interior design blog would have content on the best couches, how to style couches, how to match couches to your wall color, how to choose the right couches for your family. The articles would have charts, images, easy-to-read sub headers and Google would know this website is highly valuable for information on couches.?

The problem with SEO is that not only people who write good content can use it.?

People who wanted to make money with blogs didn't really have to research products and write quality articles. They could just research what other people were doing and summarize or aggregate other people’s content and hop to the top of Google search by doing significantly less work.?

The worst offenders were content farms, websites that employed super low wage writers to produce quickly-written, low quality content to increase how much overall content is written on their crap sites and maximize ad and affiliate revenue.

Basically, more content = money, no matter the quality (and the quality is usually terrible).

The problem exploded once these lazy fake site owners got access to AI chat bots.?

AI + Search = Eat Rocks (literally)

If you haven’t been following the AI roller coaster to nowhere, here’s the quick rundown:?

In March 2023, the nerds over at OpenAI came out with ChatGPT for humans (aka a smart chatbot that regular-everyday-non-coding-people can use with little to no effort).

Among many others, marketers, bloggers and writers flocked to the service hoping to improve their productivity or just take some of the work off their plate.

While some used ChatGPT for editing, ideation or creative process, others used it to write entire websites.

As I write this, Newsguard’s AI tracker has found 976 entirely AI-written news sites. These are entire websites where AI writes the articles with little to no oversight, they’ll have a legit sounding name like “businessonline(dot)com” so you believe it’s real.

And the growth is exponential - today we have 976, when a year ago that number was 49.

Side note: I hope Newsguard is a real website or this citing would be entirely too ironic.

AI could generate an article within a few seconds… And that is when the internet blog scammers said, “hold my beer”. Content farmers no longer had to rely on low wage workers to produce mediocre-at-best articles, they could use ChatGPT to create mediocre articles for free.

AI uses information written in the past to create new formulations of information today. Instead of getting new, fresh perspectives based on a product, idea or place the internet was flooded with piping-hot-AI-generated-garbage.?

Now, Google’s in real trouble.

Google’s primary function was to comb through the internet to get the best results, now Google’s little search crawlers must wade through a pool of AI-generated glitter glue.

Well, Google took a page from the Looney Tunes handbook: If you can’t beat ‘em. Join em.

In May 2024, Google experimented with adding AI Overviews to search results.

When you picked up your half-empty chipotle chicken bowl and googled chipotle chicken recipe, you would get a one-paragraph summary stealing the content that someone else took the time to write.

Not only does AI directly steal other’s content so you don’t go to their website at all, but the summary doesn’t share enough information for you to make the chicken.?

Leading users to search more than before because they’re not finding what they’re looking for anymore.

We were stuck with a search engine that doesn’t… search. And now have an AI that just retrieves the most random stuff. It’s like throwing a blue ball to your golden retriever and he brings back a golden lawn gnome. (Cute trick, but that's not what I wanted.)

Google launched their AI Overviews on May 21st, Fast Company published an article just 9 days later, summarizing some of the weirdest AI recommendations, including

1. Humans should eat one rock a day. I understand humans eat a lot of crap, I do love the occasional bag of whatever Cheetos are... but rocks!
2. Running with scissors has health benefits. I don't even let me two year old run with safety scissors
3. Backpacks and parachutes have the same level of effectiveness when jumping out of a plane.

Honestly, I love the public failure of AI more than I thought I would. Google has pulled back AI Overviews because, well, they kinda sucked. You'll only see AI overviews on a handful of queries as of the time of this writing.

Redditors shall inherit the internet

While Google has been googling “new ways to ruin a thriving billion dollar business” Reddit has been doing the exact opposite.

Reddit has been trying to “grow up” (aka. make money), because a business should at some point make money right? Cue a side eye to Lyft, Uber, Snapchat and the other high-valued business that have yet to turn a profit.

The perfectly-timed IPO right after the Google update that skyrocketed Reddit to broader audiences was the result of hard work an planning (which was very unfortunate, since I was hoping for some piping hot tea here).

Reddit has had plans to go public in works since 2021, and in that process Reddit wanted to turn a profit.?

Their CEO, Steve Huffman, did a few things to make that possible:?

1. Strengthening its advertising capabilities
2. Managing harassment on the site so it’s a safer, more comfortable place for new users
3. Introducing charges for developers to use their apps

He basically said (incredibly paraphrased, of course) human data is hot right now, we need to secure the bag so let's charge these big companies for it.

While all of these changes pissed off the community and frequent users, it actually led to a net benefit for reddit.?

Reddit’s placement at the top of Google during the March core update was noticeable by every Google user and captured salacious headlines with big year-over-year numbers. In reality, Reddit's search traffic has increased at a steady rate since July 2023.

Basically, Reddit has been on the come up, we're just now noticing.?

In fact, Google changed their algorithm to bring Reddit to the top in direct response to a change users were naturally making.

People want to hear from the experiences of other people, so searchers started adding the word Reddit to the end of their search queries (think “best laptop 2024 reddit”) long before Google changed their algorithm.

I was surprised to see this in my research because I thought I was the only one doing this.

Personally, I was tired of going to low quality websites with fluff pieces that didn’t give you any concrete information. My biggest pet peeve was brands whose blogs pushed their own products masked by a listicle of 13 best whatever-they-sell where the #1 option was obviously their product.

Google isn't good anymore because there’s way too much low quality, fake, AI-generated and straight-up-salesy content on the internet. It’s nearly impossible to find what you want. Hell, I’ve started asking people directly IRL (...IRL!!!!!) before I search Google now.

Reddit just feels more human.

What I couldn't figure out was why that is? As AI-conversations are exploding everywhere online, the community and conversation on Reddit feels more nuanced, colloquial and non-salesy.

Reddit is monitored by real people. Sure, Reddit has some automations that remove ai/bot content, but the human moderators have lots to do with the sites human-ness.

The truth is Reddit IS plagued by AI and bots just like the rest of the internet, but there are real humans behind the scenes working to remove spam by scanning for registered email addresses, account age, something called karma (seems like points you build up for being active in the community), manually selecting different words and phrases to auto filter on and much more. (Hats off to the Reddit mods!)

Conspiracy or Na??

Na.

Google’s shoving Reddit down your throat because AI has taken over the internet making search un-search-able, and Reddit’s the last place where real humans write real human words moderated by real humans - for now.

If we’re being our most charitable, Google is trying to make things better for it’s users and Reddit has been the calculated beneficiary.