• Reddit’s thousands of forums are a wealth of information.
• Google ranks the site higher in search results because more people are coming to it for answers.
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the site is increasingly a top destination for searches.

Reddit is a forum with over a million subreddits suitable for almost any topic imaginable.

And beneath the numerous messages posted on these subreddits, more than 100,000 of which are active at any given time, Redditors are debating the veracity of the message.

This has made Reddit a valuable destination for authentic information in the Internet age where truth can be difficult to extract from fiction.

As a result, more people than ever are looking for answers to their questions on Reddit.

While speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference this week, a journalist said she now uses Google search primarily to access Reddit and get news.

CEO of Reddit Steve Huffman said his experience was “not unique.”

“People go to Google with the intention of ending up on Reddit,” Huffman said at the conference. “And I think what happens is people know that Reddit has answers, advice, perspectives on just about anything they’re looking for.”

Google’s decades-long dominance of the Internet search market once seemed impenetrable. But this is changing, in part because of the arrival of artificial intelligence.

The rise of AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AI-powered search engines like Perplexity – which use large linguistic models trained on huge amounts of data to answer users’ questions in natural language – have begun to eat away at Google’s supremacy.

A recent study even found that younger generations, like Generation Z and Generation Alpha, no longer use the word “Google” as a verb to mean “search.”

Google launched its own AI product, Gemini, in March 2023. It now presents Google search results in natural language at the top of the page. It is deployment was difficultHowever, users have complained about the quality of its results.

While Reddit could be seen as a potential competitor to Google Search, Google itself prioritized Reddit in its results after recent modifications to its algorithm.

A Google spokesperson told Business Insider at the time of the change that the company’s research showed that “people often want to learn from others’ experiences on a topic, so we continued to make it easier to find useful perspectives on research when relevant. to a request.”

Google and Reddit also announced a deal in February allowing Google to train its AI models using Reddit comments. The spokesperson told BI that this agreement with Reddit “absolutely did not include higher ranking of its content in search.”

Huffman said at the conference that it still feels like Reddit is “married to Google,” but that “more and more people are learning that Reddit has pretty much everything you’re looking for.”

Huffman said he thinks people are drawn to Reddit because the site is made up of “communities in conversation” for “literally everything you’re experiencing.”

“If you have any questions, chances are Reddit, where people have been talking about everything for almost two decades, has an answer,” Huffman said.