Google and Reddit's Risky Partnership

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Can a single website become the reference point for the most used search engine in the world? That's what's happening between Reddit, a site that aggregates news and content from the web, and Google , which holds just under 90 percent of the online search market and has learned to trust Reddit more and more .

The consequences of this connection were felt last May, when Google launched the AI ​​Overview service in the United States, with which the site generates written responses instead of limiting itself to the usual list of results from the web. AI Overview was a clear reaction to the success of ChatGpt and other chatbots but from the first hours it ran into errors and “hallucinations,” as they are called in the industry, for example advising a user to make the mozzarella on his pizza more stringy with glue.

How could this happen? Google had based its response on information available online, taking it from a comment left on Reddit by a user, many years before. The comment was actually a joke – and the user had a bizarre nickname – but the AI ​​did not get the humor. The incident also occurred because Google has long changed its search algorithms to favor results from Reddit, for several reasons that are at the root of the complicated relationship between the two companies.

First of all, Reddit will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this year . It is, in short, an old glory of the web, and a remarkable catalog of information and content of all kinds. But above all, it has a very close-knit community, which generates interesting discussions thanks to millions of active (and human) users. The latter is an increasingly rare feature online, given that generative AIs have flooded the web with blogs, articles, comments, tweets, videos and content of all kinds generated artificially, and often passed off as real.

But Reddit's uniqueness had already become evident before the launch of ChatGPT and the boom in generative artificial intelligence. In fact, for years, a little trick to improve Google searches has been spreading online: just add "reddit" to the search to filter out the less interesting results. It wasn't always this way, of course: adding Reddit to Google searches has only become necessary in recent years, due to the increase in advertising in the search engine and the spread of SEO.

SEO refers to search engine optimization, a series of techniques and stylistic measures that can make your site more visible to Google's algorithm . For many publishers and bloggers, in fact, it is essential to appear among the first results of the search engine and the best way to do so is to respect these rules, to which we owe, for example, the bizarre structure of online recipes, which begin with several useless paragraphs before getting to the actual recipe . But the latest data published by Reddit, relating to the last quarter of 2024, also tell another story: it is not only Google users who often use Reddit to improve the service; it is Google that has chosen Reddit as its favorite site. Which, as John Herrman noted in New York Magazine, is great news for the site - more visits mean more advertising and more money - but risks throwing Reddit into the center of a much bigger game than usual.

Reddit risks getting used to this influx of new arrivals from Google , who however can decrease or disappear at any moment due to some change in the algorithm. Not to mention that these users do not enrich the site's community, they are temporary visitors. In short, it is a story already seen, both with Google and with Facebook, when in the 2010s the media sector got used to receiving visits and users in huge numbers, for a long time. Until both changed their algorithms and a mass death of newspapers began, reaching up to BuzzFeed.

So much interest in Reddit, finally, risks putting the site in the crosshairs of that process already seen in action with SEO, when more and more companies and users began to exploit the entire web to "play" with Google's algorithm, and make money. But now that the web has been colonized, closed and filled with synthetic content, now it's Reddit's turn, the last oasis of human users in the great network. Business may be going well but the pressure is rising and there is a risk that Reddit will not be able to sustain itself for long, being at the center of Google's attention.

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