Reddit and the 11.4 Million Organic Search Click Funnel

Steve Paine

(Author)

Published: 20.02.2024

Update: 23 Feb 2023. The draft S1 for the IPO is now available and states that the most recent average daily visitors rate as 73m. Source links are at the end of the article.

Update: 11 April 2023. The IPO on the 21st March ended valuing the company at $6.4 billion. March saw a Google Core Update but this did not affect the Visibility Index of reddit.com, which remains as high as before the Core Update.

The domain reddit.com is the 6th most visible domain in Google Search, US (SISTRIX VI, 11th April 2024). The Visibility Index represents a footprint, or click-potential, of over 338 million clicks per month.

The image below shows just how much that traffic could cost with a Google Ads campaign.

At the very least, presence in search results is good brand marketing. This search presence will also bring new users to the platform where they will see ads, can be converted to subscribers, app users or paying subscribers. 

SISTRIX measures the organic positioning with the Visibility Index so any additional appearances in Discover or the Discussions and Forums feature are not counted. Despite that, the current estimated traffic is equivalent to 11.4 million potential clicks per day. (Estimated range: 106748089 – 571006109 clicks per month from 25.49 known ranking keywords in Google Search US. )

In terms of Google Search potential in the US reddit.com is almost as big as facebook.com, but it’s the growth of the domain in organic search over the last six months that is the real headline.  To see a top 100 website grow by so much click potential is unique. The question is, will it stay there?

The other question is, could it grow even more?

Wikipedia, a well-organised user-generated content site, has set the bar in this respect. As the most visible website on the internet it is over seven times more visible in search than reddit.com. Google may have a special place for this independent information source and Reddit might be more commercially positioned, but there’s more space for Reddit.

By the important measure of ranking distribution across pages, a good measure of content performance, we can see that 48.9% of all reddit.com rankings appear in the Top 10 of search results. It’s a high-performance figure, but it also means that over 50% of rankings have potential for improvement. Even within page 1 of the search results the latest SISTRIX data shows that only 8% of keywords rank in positions 1 to 3.

What is Reddit delivering in search?

We can look at various statistics to get a feel for the type of searches in which Google is placing Reddit URLs. The first is a look at the search intent. Based on analysis of SERP formats, which are a strong indicator of what Google thinks the user wants, the spread of search intent looks like this. 

This intent distribution is based on 26.1 million keywords (19th Feb 2024) that we know Reddit is ranking for in the US. Note that many keywords don’t have a clear intent, or provide purely organic search results without ads, knowledge graphs or other search result features. 

The top 100 subreddits in search

Thanks to well-organised information directories on the website under the /r subreddit directory we can find the most successful topics on Reddit. 

In tabular form, here are the top 100 subreddits – directories that potentially bring the most clicks through Google search. (US data.)

For reference, 99.9% of all domains we have in our database have a Visibility Index of less than 0.1. All of these directories can be considered successful content clusters in their own right.

Who are Reddit’s competitors in search?

There are obvious competitors in Fandom, Quora and YouTube. Amazon and Wikipedia cannot be ignored either but Google, with its feature boxes, shopping boxes and other ads is also a competitor. There are hidden competitors too.

Firstly, across the complete domain, the top 10 competitors, excluding Google itself, look like this:

The top 10 list of competitors for reddit.com isn’t surprising but it’s at the subreddit level where the competitors get interesting. Here are six popular subreddits and the top competitors that aren’t part of the above list.

It’s clear that there are large, commercially-focused domains that compete. Each subreddit has its own competitor landscape.

The most visible URL in r/buyitforlife, for example, is a thread on the “best coffee maker” which gets an estimated 10980 organic clicks per month.

This one thread on one subreddit, on one domain which competes for visibility with nytimes.com, epicurious.com, target.com, cnn.com and bestbuy.com, to name just five on the list of over 1000 domains that are also on the competitor list for the URL. 

Stability

Can we look into a crystal ball and determine the future? No. Nobody knows when or how the next Google algorithm update will affect reddit.com or user-generated content in general. Nobody knows how the development of in-search AI features will affect the search result click rates. Nobody knows how much of the users’ Reddit information is going to reappear as unique answers through large language models in the future. Nobody knows how the competitors’ activity will affect the search results.

At SISTRIX we often look to see how a domain has reacted to Google updates in the past as an indicator of stability and over the last 12 months there hasn’t been a single negative impact from a Google algorithm update. The recent gains, however, are unprecedented and leave a big question mark over the domain’s stability for 2024. This one metric shows some level of positiveness but the questions above will remain unanswered.

Keep tourscanner.com in mind:

If you want a user-generated content example, Craigslist is a good one:

Spam and automated content

Finding usable data at this level is very difficult. A glance through some of the top search terms revealed nothing obvious although if you looked closely at the “best coffee maker” example above, you might have noticed something a little non-user-generated there.

It would need a more extensive study in order to determine whether the successful URLs contain spam or low-quality automated content, despite the moderation that is supposed to reduce this spam content.

Brand marketing power?

A concern of some people is the strength of Reddit URLs in brand searches. Reddit does indeed appear for many brand searches. This examples shows Reddit ranking at #10 for Bestbuy.

At first glance it’s a good result but unless you’re at position 1 for a brand search there’s only a low  probability of a click.  The following CTR graph relates to brand searches.

After sorting and filtering 21 million ranking keywords for brands, it is difficult to find anything relevant or serious in the top three positions for brands. 

Summary

Reddit is a user-generated information ecosystem and appears to have achieved traction in Google Search that few other sites have. The major UGC websites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Fandom and YouTube compete across the board as you would expect but when you drill down into the subreddits, each has its own competitive environment. 

48.9% of all reddit.com rankings appear in the Top 10 but only 8% in the top three. There is potential for growth.

The unique 10X growth in Visibility Index in the last six months puts it in uncharted territory in terms of stability. After such unique growth it’s not far-fetched to expect some sort of correction. The two questions are: 1) Where will reddit.com settle after the next Google update? 2) Will competitors respond at the subreddit level?

Finally, on the topic of risks, the product must remain attractive to users. Myspace is the example to keep in mind.

Sources

Draft S1 including prospectus for the IPO

Reddit AI licensing deal.

Google announcement: Reddit partnership.

The data used in this report is from SISTRIX and focused on the US market. You can find out more about the Visibility Index here. All images above have links into the SISTRIX data for those with an account. (Free trial periods are available.)