Suddenly, Reddit Everywhere

Written in 2026, looking back at the moment Reddit took over the search results, now that I know what it was rehearsing for.

Sometime in the second half of 2023 the search results changed complexion. You’d look up almost anything with a human question inside it, best rice cooker, is this normal, how do I get rid of this, and half the page would be Reddit threads and old forum posts. Real people, arguing, contradicting each other, being unhelpful and then extremely helpful two comments later. It happened fast enough that everyone noticed at once, and adding the word reddit to your searches became a habit people talked about openly.

On the surface this looked like a win for authenticity. Under the surface it was Google admitting something uncomfortable about the rest of its own index.

What the shift was really saying

Think about what it means for a search engine to decide that the best answer to your question is a forum thread from 2016. It means the engine has looked at all the polished, optimised, professionally produced content it spent twenty years teaching people to make, and concluded that a stranger’s unedited comment is more trustworthy than most of it.

That is a remarkable thing for Google to say about the web Google shaped. The open content ecosystem had been optimised, by people like me, for so long and so thoroughly that a lot of it had been optimised into uselessness. Every article hedged, padded, structured for the algorithm, saying the same safe nothing. And the whole time, the actually useful, specific, willing-to-be-wrong opinions were sitting in forums that nobody had bothered to optimise, precisely because nobody was trying to rank them.

So the Reddit surge wasn’t really Google discovering that people are great. It was Google conceding a trust crisis inside its own results, and reaching for the one corner of the web that still smelled like it hadn’t been gamed. I found that both funny and a little sad, given who’d done the gaming.

The part I only understood later

At the time I read it as a ranking story. Forums up, thin content down, adjust accordingly. Useful, tactical, a thing to tell clients.

What I missed was that it was a rehearsal. Google was learning to prefer content that reads as lived rather than produced, first-hand rather than assembled, a person who was actually there over a page that merely covers the topic. That exact preference is the one that would go on to govern the AI answers. When a generated answer needs a source it can stand behind, it reaches for the same quality the Reddit shift was reaching for: something that sounds like it came from real experience, because the machine can’t manufacture that itself.

So the forum takeover of late 2023 was the trailer for the whole feature. Google was telling you, months ahead, what it would trust when it started writing answers instead of listing links. It would trust the thing that couldn’t be faked at scale. Reddit just happened to be the largest pile of that thing lying around.

What I do with it now

I stopped treating the Reddit surge as a loophole to exploit and started treating it as instructions. The results were plainly asking for content with a human who was actually present inside it. That’s not a trick to reverse-engineer, it’s a description of what to make.

I got there slowly. In October 2023 I was mostly annoyed that my clean, well-built pages were losing to a chaotic thread with three typos in the top comment. It took me a while to stop being annoyed and start listening. The thread was winning because a real person had actually solved the problem in it, and I hadn’t. That’s not a ranking factor, that’s just the truth finally getting rewarded, and I’d been on the wrong side of it for a while without noticing.