In recent years, Reddit has seen a significant increase in traffic from search engines as users commonly add “Reddit” to their searches to access genuine discussions and opinions. Whether seeking product reviews or travel tips, many are diving into Reddit’s extensive archives for insights.
However, it appears that Reddit has taken steps to limit visibility across most search engines.
Recent findings indicate that Reddit has begun restricting the majority of search engines from crawling and indexing its site, effectively removing Reddit posts from search results on these platforms.
Currently, Google remains the only exception where users can still find Reddit content through searches.
Which search engines are impacted and why?
Attempts to search Reddit on other popular platforms such as Bing and DuckDuckGo yield very few recent results. Many recent links have not appeared because they were not indexed before Reddit implemented this restriction.
Utilizing search queries like “site:reddit.com” on Bing over the past week has returned no results.
On June 25, Reddit announced a change to its Robots Exclusion Protocol in response to an influx of bots scraping its content. The company emphasized that the intention was to protect public content, without suggesting that legitimate platforms assisting the broader internet would be impacted.
“Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content,” the platform stated.
This decision to block search engines has sparked controversy, particularly given that Google continues to display recent Reddit search results, seemingly aided by a financial partnership between the two companies.
The relationship between Google and Reddit
This year, Reddit entered a $60 million agreement with Google, granting the search engine access to Reddit’s content for training its AI models.
In official statements, Reddit has clarified that the recent changes are not directly tied to the partnership with Google, asserting, “We block all crawlers that are unwilling to commit to not using crawl data for AI training, which aligns with our Public Content Policy and updated robots.txt file.”
Sources suggested to various outlets that the exclusion from search results stems from Microsoft’s refusal to comply with Reddit’s terms regarding AI data usage.
If true, this action by Reddit highlights significant concerns regarding a future where search engine access may become contingent upon financial agreements, raising questions about the independence of organic search results. ECNETNews will continue to monitor this developing story.
