They mention in the article about Reddit now being included in search results and I’ve noticed that as well. The irony there is that Google results have been so overrun by shitty content farm sites that searching for specific things like reviews or troubleshooting for products or games was virtually useless unless you also included “Reddit” as part of your query since you were more likely to see legit people talking about product issues and solutions. Not to say Reddit isn’t astroturfed but certainly not to the level that Google’s results are. I’m not totally convinced that Google’s deal to crawl Reddit for AI purposes is directly related since bumping Reddit up in the search priority does make search results more relevant in a lot of cases.

It does seem to be an awful time for independent websites and has been for years since the big tech companies have been doing everything in their power to keep people within their walled gardens.