While you were sleeping, Reddit took over.
Our pick for 2025 trend to watch across demographics in online behavior? The continued importance of public discussion… but don’t take our word for it – take the hundreds of millions seeing Reddit now on first search of Google thanks to their 2024 partnership. A partnership which also sees Reddit block all other search engines but Google – and Google forsake their own Google Reviews as sources for their AI. We have seen it in all of our digital ethnographies of the last several years. New studies by others are only validating what we’ve known for 15 years: people prefer peer discussion.
An Adobe study midyear presciently saw what we are seeing in every study we present lately: Reddit isn’t just here to stay – it’s been here a long time and even the older discussion is impacting current search in an evergreen way.
“41% of Americans now believe Reddit is a better search engine than Google”
“92% of those using Reddit as a search engine said the results were trustworthy, while 95% found them helpful.”
“…one out of every 10 small business owners reported a Reddit post ranking above their business page in Google.”
Did Google make a deal with the devil? Our clients have known about the power of sites like Reddit for over 15 years. This year in particular there wasn’t a single research initiative that didn’t feature Reddit’s massive growth – from consumer goods and services, to healthcare, to DoD.
Ping me if you want to get a sense of the grip it has on your audiences!
Dean Browell
Co-founder Dean Browell leads Feedback’s research as the resident PhD with a passion for how generations interact online. He is also co-founder of Hidden In Plain Site and President of the Board for The Poe Museum, and University of Richmond’s Institute on Philanthropy. Dean teaches courses at VCU School of Business.