Reddit continues to elevate itself as an SEO powerhouse and a destination for topical knowledge, including local and location-relevant fare. As it continues to hit key milestones, we’ve watched closely but arguably haven’t given it the ink it deserves. So let’s dive into Reddit and what’s driving it.
Backing up, one thing Reddit has done right is to create a brand around the sleepy internet format of comment boards. One of the web’s first formats – a la AOL topic boards – it’s long been known for misinformation, mistrust, and sometimes contentious exchanges. So you could say it has trust issues.
What Reddit did to resolve that mistrust was to federate and wrap a brand around far-reaching topical boards. Though questionable content can still populate the depths of its many sub-reddits, the company has counterbalanced trust and credibility issues with a recognizable name – a known quantity.
Pepsi Choice
In that sense, Reddit has become a go-to place for the wisdom of the crowds. The brand equity that it cultivated by federating all that wisdom makes it the Pepsi choice for everything from home theater setup to landscaping your yard. And all the above has sparked momentum, volume, and network effect.
Beyond actively choosing and navigating to Reddit – or bookmarking subreddits on their favorite topics – users are often led there by the nose. In other words, SEO. All those far-reaching conversations and knowledge are SEO gold – placing Reddit in prime position when it comes to billions of Google queries.
All of this traction materialized most recently in Reddit’s Q2 earnings. Ad revenue – which logically represents 92 percent of Reddit’s revenue – totalled 465 million during the quarter. Overall revenue was up 78 percent year-over-year, which widely beat expectations, and caused its stock to jump 20 percent.
Double-Edged Sword
But it’s not all good news for Redit. It now faces the common and daunting possibility that the AI-era’s zero-click trend will diminish its traffic. That’s a threat that looms over all publishers, but Reddit perhaps has the most to lose because of the massive long tail of traffic it receives from traditional search.
The answer could be a double-edged sword. Because Reddit is such a vast fountain of topical knowledge, it could be a top source of AI-generated answers from AI engines and Google AI Overviews. And as long as citations remain a core part of these engines’ public trust-building, Reddit will benefit.
As the equation goes these days, it’s a question of whether citations offset the diminished traffic from zero-click search. The answer is often no, but not always. Meanwhile, Reddit is making moves to have a more active role in owning its fate, including doubling down on AI and becoming its own search engine.
Zero-Click Bloodbath
Taking those one at a time, Reddit has inked content licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI. It knows it sits on an AI-training gold mine and wants to monetize it. Meanwhile, its own conversational AI tool, Reddit Answers, now has 6 million users as of its Q2 earnings – up from 1 million users in Q1.
As for its search engine play, it’s going to surface its search feature – a typical site-search function – more front & center. This move is driven by the fact that its site search has more than 70 million weekly users; and that many users append “reddit” to their Google search queries in hopes of ending up there.
The goal would be to circumvent Google with direct navigation traffic that then searches locally – something Amazon has pulled off well. “Circumvent” is the keyword (excuse the pun) as this would also mean that Reddit can insulate itself from the zero-click bloodbath. That’s the part we’ll be watching.
Header image credit: Brett Jordan on Unsplash
