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.
This is actually huge. I’ve used Reddit to SEO boost some of my services and can vouch for how high Google ranks the pages that surface on it. Reddit is gonna bleed and hurt long-term numbers for this.