Plenty Google Search users were appending “site:reddit.com” to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called “Perspectives”. Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).
This means that those search users won’t beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there’s a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit’s competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).
Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.
It’s a bit of off-topic, but what feels weird for me is that I’m probably using search engines in a way that almost nobody does - because not only I don’t use this “cheat code”, but I’ve actively uBlacklist’ed reddit from appearing in search. (When I want an answer I want an answer, not a bunch of redditors saying “I dun unrurrstand” or circlejerking.)
Still, a lot of people do it. For those I hope that the new feature becomes useful.