Over the past few years, Reddit experienced Traffic from search engines surges. Why? Many Internet users have resorted to adding “Reddit” to the end of their searches so that they can find conversations and opinions from real people. Whether it’s product reviews or travel recommendations, many people look to scour Reddit’s discussion archives to find what they’re looking for.
However, right now there seems to be only one search engine where users can actually do this.
As first discovered by tech media 404 media, Reddit has begun blocking the vast majority of web search engines from crawling and indexing its site. This means that Reddit posts will no longer appear in search results for users on these platforms.
But there is one exception, users can still search Reddit, and that is Google.
Reddit is cracking down on AI bots
Which search engines are affected and why?
Now, when you search for Reddit on popular search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, you’ll find few recent results for Reddit.com. As 404 Media reports, recent Reddit links aren’t showing up because they weren’t crawled and indexed before Reddit made the change.
Over the past week, Mashable tried searching Bing for any results for Reddit.com using “site:reddit.com”, but came up with zero results.
Mix and match speed of light
Reddit declare On June 25, the company made changes to its Robots Exclusion Agreement (robots.txt) on its website. Judging from statements made at the time, this did not mean that organizations and platforms that legitimately help the wider web and its users would be affected.
“Reddit believes in an open internet, but not in the misuse of public content,” Reddit’s agreement reads.
Blocking the search engine entirely on Reddit would certainly be a controversial move in itself. However, there is one search engine that is pulling recent search results from Reddit: Google, which has a financial relationship with Reddit.
Google’s relationship with Reddit
Earlier this year, Reddit and Google Enter A $60 million deal was struck to allow the search giant to use Reddit content to train its artificial intelligence models.
In a statement provided to multiple outlets, Reddit said its recent changes had nothing to do with its partnership with Google
“We block any crawlers that are unwilling to commit to not using crawled data for artificial intelligence training, in compliance with enforcing our public content policies and updated robots.txt files,” Reddit said in a statement. enjet.
Engadget also claims that Reddit was reportedly excluded from the search because Microsoft disagreed with the platform’s terms regarding artificial intelligence.
If speculation is correct, Reddit’s move appears to be quite unprecedented and highlights the potential danger in the future that search engines will pay even for organic search results. Mashable has reached out to Reddit for comment and we will update this story if we learn more.
