This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Stacker and Ahrefs
Think beyond just the top Subreddits. All subscribers can download a list of the top 100 Subreddits; paid subscribers can download the top 10,000.
See the Stacker offer at the end of the email for a free PR story just for booking a meeting
I don’t know whether to believe the recent news about Reddit’s declining visibility in ChatGPT, but it doesn't matter. Reddit’s visibility in LLMs is of interest from a visibility standpoint, but the people negotiating partnership deals for Reddit should be focused only on what that visibility means for revenue. Whatever happens with ChatGPT's Reddit index isn’t that meaningful if ChatGPT has a much smaller market share than Google. Google is the company building the machine that will replace the click, ultimately undermining Reddit’s core business.
As an advertising-driven business, if the visibility does not lead to clicks that drive ad impressions, that visibility is worthless. Regardless, there are already rumors that Reddit wants to walk away from those visibility deals, and I think they should.
[Sponsored by Ahrefs]
You know Ahrefs. You may not know it has a very capable free tier.
No trial, no credit card – a permanent free account. Verify a site you own and you get Site Explorer for its rankings, top pages and backlinks, Site Audit crawling for 170+ technical issues, and Web Analytics with an AI-traffic breakdown. It's the tool you already know, on your own site, for nothing.
Visit ahrefs.com/free
As reported, Reddit’s deal with Google is sixty million a year to share all its data. As I have written before, sites that attempt to spam Reddit just for LLM visibility are unaware that LLM’s see the whole data feed. They don’t just crawl Reddit; Reddit shares the firehose of all activity.
Tens of millions of dollars is not a rounding error for a public company with quarterly reporting requirements. Yet the smart move, in my opinion, is to walk and block the LLM crawler outright and kill any other LLM partnership deal. This would include ChatGPT too.
(Note: I believe that Google will retain the search crown, but it’s also possible that ChatGPT could one day overtake Google. If Reddit gives its data to ChatGPT, it could end up in the same situation it did with Google if ChatGPT becomes the dominant search platform.)
There’s more than one Googlebot
One clarification before I make the case: Google has multiple bots. Googlebot handles search indexing. Google-Extended is a separate token that only governs whether Gemini can train on the content, and Google has been explicit that disabling it does not affect search rankings.
The problem is that an AI Overview is not a Gemini training artifact. It's generated live from the same search index that Googlebot builds, so blocking Google-Extended will not stop all of their traffic loss. AI Overviews will still depress Reddit traffic, as they do for almost every other site on the web, and there’s no way around this. Regardless, Reddit should stop intentionally hurting its traffic by giving away more than it needs to.
What that means is that Googlebot sees what anyone browsing Reddit can see, but the partnership feeds Google what the crawler never gets: deleted comments, banned posts, and the whole moderation trail. The additional data is the upgrade between a model that can summarize Reddit as it is discovered and one that summarizes it well enough that users don’t need to check the source. Reddit is on the losing side of this upgrade.
I want to focus on Gemini because if and when AI Mode becomes the default search experience, the information pulled into Gemini will be even more impactful than AI Overviews, which are, for the most part, just summaries of search results.
Reddit is a social network
Google pays Reddit to train its models on years of threads, comments, and data about everything from cooking to marriage. The training payment and the traffic loss are connected, but they're not the same mechanism. The traffic loss from AI Overviews affects Reddit as it does every other site, because Googlebot's public crawl already feeds it. The data firehose is the part Reddit is choosing to keep optional, and it's what could sink Reddit. Reddit has never published what that lost traffic is actually worth, but a check that's fixed in size against a threat that grows every quarter is a bad trade on its own terms
Reddit’s entire business model depends on people showing up and engaging with the platform; showing up in LLMs does not, on its own, drive ad clicks. As I have written many times in this newsletter and on LinkedIn, Reddit is a social media platform, not an informational site like Wikipedia. Its loop is the product. Ad revenue on Reddit is not built on drive-by visits, unlike an informational site that can derive revenue from a page load with a visible ad. Reddit’s model needs a click from engaged users.
An AI response that scraped Reddit’s knowledge kills that product loop at the exact moment it would have started if the user discovered this information on Reddit’s website. For example, someone searches “why does the water on my Samsung refrigerator stop filling” (a search I do frequently). Google pulls a top Reddit answer to give me the fix. I never need to visit Reddit to see the question that led to the answer nor the context of the answer itself.
It’s hard to be precise here without knowing where Gemini learns from. If Gemini pulls it live from the same search index that Googlebot builds, as AI Overview does, blocking Google-Extended doesn't help because that token drives training, not live retrieval. However, if Gemini pulled it from something it learned during training on the full feed, the block is exactly the fix. Since Google will never tell us which one it is, blocking Google-Extended remains the best insurance.
Blocking LLMs from scraping Reddit won't return the clicks that AI Overviews have already captured. Instead, it will retain the clicks that AI Overviews haven't already intercepted, preventing them from becoming training material for a better future summary.
AI robs Reddit of traffic
Without Gemini's robust response, I might have been forced to do a traditional search for a better response that included what AI Mode lacked. There, Reddit would likely rank among the top 10 blue links in traditional organic search, and I would arrive at that same Reddit thread to find the answer and possibly click an ad. Reddit does well in AI Overviews and organic search because for niche queries like this one, it is an unparalleled resource.
Going back to the partnership payments, those checks sound like real money until you set them against what Reddit actually sells. Reddit was not created to sell data. Reddit sells attention to an engaged audience that keeps coming back because the site literally rewards contributions with karma points. If you take away the coming back, you have gutted the entire mechanism. The partnership payments are now a check written against a business Google is actively dismantling one LLM response at a time.
Compare this to Wikipedia, which does not need you to return as a repeat visitor. It needs you to load a page and leave satisfied, so when they run their annual donation campaign, you act. A summary in a chatbot barely dents that donation model because that money comes from asking a small number of visitors for a few dollars once a year, not from advertisers paying per click. The donation appeal works if it’s seen just once, while an ad business needs all those repeat visits.
Reddit’s value is in the user growth
Reddit is the opposite of this entirely because its value comes from threads that keep unfolding, and it even sends notifications that pull you back days later to reengage. This experience does not survive contact with a two-paragraph AI summary that answers your question.
Reddit selling data is exactly backward for a company whose stock price lives and dies on daily active users and time spent. In the long term, Wall Street does not actually want Reddit’s licensing revenue to grow at the expense of engagement. This doesn’t mean that Reddit should reject every deal with every AI company, but partnership deals that give away everything that makes Reddit a social network and community, at the expense of the actual discussion elements that keep Reddit growing, are not in its long-term interests.
Reddit needs to think long term
Every deal Reddit makes that feeds the information aspects of LLMs comes at the expense of the traffic and users Reddit needs to keep Reddit being Reddit. Reddit should not be replacing itself with LLMs they don’t own. If Reddit were to block LLMs from scraping it, Reddit would continue to drive traffic through its organic visibility, and those clicks would drive even more discussions and engagement, benefiting it in the long term.
I lived a version of this before. In 2011, I worked at a startup that lost 60%+ of its traffic in a single day due to the Google Panda algorithm update. Google unilaterally decided how much of our own audience we were allowed to reach, and there was no way to get it back. What saved our ad-driven business in the short term while we worked on an SEO recovery plan was building real standing on a platform Google didn't control. I learned how to become a top contributor on both Digg and Reddit (I still have my 20K+ Karma accounts), taught myself paid search, and diversified our reliance on Google organic traffic.
Reddit should stop funding the tool that is robbing its business. As a byproduct, they will also disincentivize the spam attracted by the supposed LLM visibility that marketers are chasing.
Marketers should participate on Reddit because it is a social network, not because of AEO. If you have not yet explored investing in Reddit for its community aspects, yesterday was the best time to do so, but today will suffice as well.
Reach out if I can help you rethink a marketing pivot on Reddit.
[Sponsored by Stacker]
Earned Media Is How Brands Get Cited in AI Search
See why 84% of AI citations come from earned media coverage.
Learn how brands earn placement across 3,000+ vetted news publishers.
For twenty years, SEO budgets centered on content visibility and backlinks. AI search reshaped both within months.
Large language models gravitate toward brands that are already established and widely cited. That recognition comes from earned media. Muck Rack’s analysis of 25 million+ AI citations found earned media drove 84% of results, with paid content responsible for a mere 0.3%.
Stacker turns brand-funded stories into editorially reviewed content, placed natively across 3,000+ vetted news publishers, with publisher-verified reporting your team can audit. One well-built story on a trusted, high-authority publisher builds more model-visible brand authority than most backlink campaigns combined.