You know the move. You tack “Reddit” onto the end of a search because you don’t trust the ten “best of” pages that load first. Lately, you don’t have to. Reddit is already there — above the people who wrote the articles, tested the products, or did the reporting.

Last year, a commenter on my AA battery guide asked me to test USB-C AA batteries. So I bought them, tested them, tore one down, and wrote the review. If you search “USB-C AA battery review” on Google now, you’ll find my work — but not on MakeUseOf. You’ll find it on Reddit. Same title, same images, posted by an anonymous stranger. In my results, it even ranked above the AI Overview. The original article sits at the bottom.

The reader still got served. Yes. The work still got done. It’s only the credit, the traffic, and the reason to ever do it again that went somewhere else.

I’m not writing this because I am bitter about the clicks (though I am). I’m writing it because this is the actual problem the modern web increasingly is facing: giant platforms feeding on original work, anonymous strangers being promoted as the absolute providers of truth for the sake of their giant platforms, and smaller publishers being told to keep producing while the reasons to produce are all stripped away.

So yes, this is about Reddit. It is also about Google. More than anything, it is about another corporate choke point tightening around the internet.

Google’s official explanation is reasonable

But it doesn’t survive Google’s own rulebook

Google started favoring human discussion and first-person experience because people got tired of SEO sludge. That’s the “we tested 47 blenders” pages where they’d tested zero and the recipe blogs that dragged you through someone’s childhood before giving you the recipe. Reddit, the largest pile of human discussion on the internet, won.

Tidy and probably partly true. But it doesn’t match Google’s own stated values.

For years now, Google has preached E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. It’s the framework that publishers rebuilt themselves around with author bios, credentials, and first-person experience. The logic is simple: if you don’t have an established track record on a topic, your content gets ranked lower than someone who does.

By that standard, an anonymous Reddit thread has no business outranking expert websites. I am a real person with a verifiable history of writing about technology. Who is SpicyMelon38? If they comment “Ex-Microsoft engineer here,” do we just take that? Anyone can type anything. Google promotes Reddit anyway, because it’s deemed more “real” and “human.”

Google paid Reddit $60 million

Reddit gave them access to AI training data

When I write “AI” here, I mean an LLM. A large language model works on text to generate more text. Consider how many AI detectors are out there. I have written a dead giveaway list of AI writing myself. Even Wikipedia has a guide on how to detect AI writing. What I mean is that AI writing sounds AI, because it was written by AI and not by a human. It is undesireable, and companies of course, want to make their AI sound more “human.”

Well, if you wanted to train an AI to sound more human, would you train it on public domain classic literature novels, or on actual modern conversation? I suppose it’s the latter, and if so, then Reddit is a goldmine of exactly this kind of data.

On February 22, 2024, Google and Reddit announced a deal worth roughly $60 million a year. Google got structured, real-time access to Reddit’s entire data feed to train Gemini and improve Search. Reddit got the cash and access to Google’s AI tools.

If you put those two facts together, there’s an obvious conclusion: Google wanted Reddit’s data, and paid the rest of the price in search rankings. Promoting Reddit drives traffic to Reddit, which generates more data for Google to train on. Everyone wins. Yay.

Reddit’s Google visibility jumped 1,328% between mid-2023 and early 2024.

There’s also one obvious objection, which is the timing. Reddit’s Google visibility jumped 1,328% between mid-2023 and early 2024 — well before the deal was announced. A contract signed in February 2024 can’t have caused a surge that started in 2023. But February 22 is when the public was told, not when the deal was made. Reddit had already disclosed the partnership to prospective IPO investors, describing an agreement with a search provider made “earlier in the year.” The surge and the deal overlap more neatly than the announcement date suggests.

Then, in July 2024, Reddit blocked Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other crawlers from indexing fresh content — and left Google alone. Microsoft confirmed Bing stopped receiving current Reddit results. The only other search engine still showing up-to-date Reddit threads is Kagi, which sources its index from Google.

Reddit says this had nothing to do with the deal. Maybe. But the effect is the same either way: Google now has something close to exclusive access to fresh Reddit content, for both Search and AI training.

Reddit isn’t the problem

The incentives are

When I want to know if a game runs on a Steam Deck, or I’m troubleshooting an obscure software error, a thread of strangers will often beat one polished article. Reddit is, a lot of the time, the right answer.

But Reddit isn’t the entire internet, and Google is increasingly treating it like it is. That creates two problems, and only one of them is about my feelings.

The first is incentive. Someone searched “USB-C AA battery review.” They wanted exactly what I made, but Google gave them a Reddit link to my article, ranked above my article. I still did the work. It takes away the incentive of writing the best guide or review, because it doesn’t matter how good what I write is, it’s not going to beat Reddit.

The second problem is the one Google is supposedly solving for. The entire pitch for elevating Reddit is that it’s more real, more human, more trustworthy than an SEO-farmed page. Fine. But if a single Reddit comment can outrank a specialist publication, then a marketer, a competitor, or a bot farm has every reason on earth to go win that thread. “Ex-Microsoft engineer here” costs nothing to type.

This isn’t the first time

Google has a pattern of promoting what it owns or pays for

Yelp built the most comprehensive database of local business reviews on the internet. Then Google Maps got good enough, and Google started surfacing its own reviews at the top of every local search. Yelp’s traffic collapsed. The company has been arguing about it in court and to regulators ever since.

It happened to travel too. Kayak, Skyscanner, and TripAdvisor spent years building flight and hotel search tools that people actually used. Then Google became a flight and hotel search engine, put itself at the top of results, and the independent players lost the top of the funnel overnight.

The pattern is the same every time. Google identifies a category where third-party sites are capturing attention. Google either builds its own version, acquires one, or — as with Reddit — strikes a deal with the dominant player. Then that result gets promoted above the independents who built the category in the first place. The independents had no seat at the table when the arrangement was made, and no recourse after.

Reddit is the latest iteration. Google has been open about one thing: its AI search operates on the same ranking principles as regular Search. So as AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb more of how people actually find things, the same logic applies. Reddit content feeds the index. Reddit content trains the model. Reddit content surfaces in the answer.

There was a real problem with the old web. Yes. The SEO sludge was real and it deserved to lose. But the solution Google landed on didn’t fix it. As is with everything in the world we live in today, corporations only take in the good of the consumer when it aligns with what’s good for them. This time, Google is once again rerouting the web away from the people who built it, and toward whoever Google happened to cut a deal with this time.