Reddit's organic traffic jumped 189% to 200 million monthly visits in five months. Google now prioritizes firsthand human experience over AI content, and Reddit's voting system surfaces trusted answers. Marketers can replicate this by emphasizing real stories and author credentials to prove authenticity.
All right, so we are going to talk about how Reddit went from 69 million visits a month, haha, that's not a joke, 69 million visits per month to 200 million visits per month. And this is coming from organic. So Neil, have you seen this at all?
I have not seen it, but this just tells me that we should spend more time on Reddit ads. Although it's still not a lot of traffic from an ad perspective.
Here, look at this, 189% increase in organic traffic. This is from Chris Long. And in the past 5 months, Reddit has seen a meteoric rise in organic traffic going from 69 to 200. Here's a breakdown of the recent success and what it means for SEOs. And so during the past 5-year period, Reddit saw very little movement in terms of organic traffic. From 2017 to 2023, they only netted roughly 5 million monthly sessions.
Okay.
Fairly paltry gains considering that the rate that they source UGC. In June of this year, Reddit started to see notable gains in the the organic traffic that they're getting. In the past 5 months, they've seen a huge increase and seemingly benefit from every single core algorithm update along the way. When looking at the data, some of their biggest gains have come from queries such as ChatGPT, cool math games, Xbox Series, HBO Max. When evaluating why Google might be giving preference to Reddit, I think there are a few clear trends. ChatGPT differentiation. So Google's trying to clearly look for UGC and firsthand experience, quote unquote. And that's a big one I think we should perhaps put a bookmark in. And maybe we can talk about that right now. Have you heard of this firsthand experience thing?
Yes, but that's E. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And Google ended up talking about firsthand experiences. Firsthand experience goes to the experience even more now than last, than ever. Yeah.
So yeah, especially, I mean, this is important to call out, right? They're looking for stuff that's different than AI. So let's just simplify it to that. Number 2 is optionality. When you see Reddit threads ranking, it oftentimes gives 3 or 4 other netted Nested search results beneath. Showing Reddit threads gives users multiple pathways to their answers while only taking up a single SERP spot. Okay. So that's another thing for Google, right? They don't want to just like show all of their results, right? They want to, you know, they want to give some other sites some love as well. Community-driven answers, blah, blah, blah. I think that the key takeaway here is, and I agree with this guy, I think this is a strong sign that we'll continue to see Google push to integrate or create content where human-generated content is involved. The question then becomes, what happens when those communities start to use AI more heavily in their content?
Well, A, I think Google will know and others will know when it's AI-generated content and it won't do as well. And B, the reason I think Reddit does really well with UGC and a lot of people don't do well with UGC is it's a voting system. So they can clearly know what people actually care about and what they don't care about. There's a lot of sites like forums out there that have tons of UGC, but it's crap. and you don't see them getting tons of rankings. But on the flip side, whether it's Reddit or Wikipedia, the reason their UGC does really well is because it's curated. It's modified by multiple people. It's voted on, at least in Reddit's case. And this allows them to really showcase the stuff that's great. And then it gives signals to Google to be like, this is the stuff people care for. Let's pull this first. Because if it has 5,000 upvotes and very little downvotes, Oh, we know that people actually consider this valid and it can help them solve their problem for whatever they're searching for.
Look, Google's looking for more. They want to be able to verify that this is legit content. And so the other thing that they're doing now is that they will take into account whoever's the author of the post. They will look at their social profiles. They want to get a sense for how real this person is. Same thing with the double E-A-T piece of it. They want to look for firsthand experience. They want knowledge sharing. They want stories as well. Because ultimately that's what engages the users, right? Because we're moving more and more into a world where, like we talked about a couple episodes ago, we've been experimenting a lot with ChatGPT, but at the end of the day, what we need to do is help users find what they're looking for, not just create a bunch of more spam for the internet, which is what SEOs are used to doing.
Yes. So if you want to create content and do amazing, whether it's UGC or not, follow the W-E-A-T. Reddit's seeing the lift from that. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. If your content showcases those variables or some of those variables, you're more likely to do well, especially in the world of AI because AI doesn't have any of those things. There's no experience, it's written by a, you know, machine or a robot or whatever you want to call it. There's no expertise, there's no authority, there's no trust. And you can say ChatGPT can fake it, but Google wants it from a human.
Yep. And the other thing I'll say around double E-A-T is if you want to make this actionable, get together with your SEO and your content team and just ask this question, like, what are some absolutely crazy things we can do to demonstrate double E-A-T? And you're using that crazy framework because that crazy framework takes budgets out of the constraints, like it takes all constraints off, right? So if you had unlimited budget, unlimited resources, what could you do to help push this E-A-T thing forward, right? Double E-A-T thing forward. And then also like operate within constraints as well. You can have a separate exercise for that, but that will at least start to get the wheels turning in terms of how you can think about this strategically and how you can hopefully get a 189% lift, which is the same as Reddit or even better than that. So anything else, Neil?
Nope, that's it.
All right, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Check out this next video over here if you want to continue to get better at marketing, and we'll see you tomorrow.
