Hardly any diversity at Google – Reddit is overly represented

Google appears to have a serious problem with diversity in its search results. According to a recent analysis, the social news aggregator Reddit dominated the so-called SERP results for “discussions and forums” by a significant margin. The backgrounds.

Reddit appears 97.5 percent of the time in Google searches for product reviews. The social news aggregator occupies almost two-thirds of the reserved spaces in the SERP results for “discussions and forums”. This is the result of a current analysis.

Google: Reddit dominates SERP results for discussions and forums

The abbreviation SERP stands for “Search Engine Result Page”. The term refers to the search results that are displayed to users after entering a search term in search engines such as Google and Co. Google divides these so-called SERP results into different categories – including the “Discussions and Forums” section.

This should allow users to find other people's experiences on certain topics. Since the so-called Helpful Content Update of September 2023, this category has played an increasingly important role in Google search results. The problem is that the SERP results for “Discussions and Forums” are hugely unbalanced.

Because Reddit dominates the search results by a large margin. This was followed by the question-answer network Quora. According to the analysis, which includes 10,000 keywords, such “discussions and forums” appear in 77 percent of searches. A total of 766 individual forums appeared in the Google search.

However, Reddit and Quora had three times higher visibility than any other forum. For example, Reddit was shown a total of 14,263 times for 7,509 out of 10,000 searches. Quora appeared in 3,513 SERP results and appeared a total of 3,832 times.

Google is making its search worse

All other platforms (764) appeared together just 4,989 times. In contrast to Reddit, most sites did not receive a second listing, according to the analysis. The problem is that Reddit can provide users with helpful answers via Google search, but the platform also seems to have a massive spam problem.

As analyst Glen Allsopp found in his survey, over half of the Reddit threads examined contained advertising links in the comments. Allsopp writes that “Google’s promotion of these links appears excessive.” His devastating verdict: “The current search results are the worst I can remember.”

But given this, why does Google prefer Reddit? This could be due, among other things, to the fact that numerous users have increasingly attached the word “Reddit” to their search queries in recent years. The analysis again suggests that the search engine giant “overcorrected” such entries, i.e. made them worse.

Another problem: According to the analysis, many Reddit threads that appear in the SERP results contain completely meaningless and thematically inappropriate content that was obviously formulated by an AI. The creators of such posts only care about including affiliate links in the posts.

Against this background, it is incomprehensible that Google tripled or quadrupled Reddit traffic in its searches within a year. I'd even go so far as to say that the company has massively worsened its SERP results as a result – aside from all the other obvious spam issues.

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