For years now, on a wide range of topics, Google Search has been sending lots of people to Reddit. At first, this wasn’t the company’s idea: Users, unimpressed by spammy, cluttered, inauthentic results, started appending the site’s name to their queries on their own. Gradually, both Google and Reddit embraced this dynamic. For Google, that meant giving more visibility to Reddit posts by default; for Reddit, it mostly just meant welcoming a flood of traffic , which was timed nicely for its IPO: The company’s stock price has increased by more than 400 percent since its listing in 2024, while its revenue has doubled.

As this co-dependence became outwardly obvious, another aspect of their relationship — this one more formal — was being negotiated in private. Google didn’t just need Reddit

See Full Page