Reddit Blocks Bing as Google Clicks Grow Like Crazy

Reddit gets more than 60% of its traffic from search, but about 58% of that is from Google, < 1% from Bing.

As reported in Search Engine Land, Reddit recently confirmed that it is blocking Microsoft’s Bing from indexing its website, while continuing to allow indexing by Google’s web crawler. Reddit said it made the change by updating the robots.txt file served up when Bing’s internet crawler bot visits reddit.com. That’s the internet standard for encouraging or discouraging search engine bots.

Reddit has grown concerned about its content being gobbled up by GenAIengines, which index websites in much the same way that search engines do. So it is attempting to block indexing by bots from companies who don’t provide compensation for access to the content. Reddit now has a licensing deal with Google to index the site for search and AI but has not yet reached a similar deal with Bing’s leadership.

Besides, referrals from Bing make up less than 1% of Reddit’s traffic, according to Similarweb estimates. In other words, Reddit is not giving up much by excluding Bing. In comparison, Google referrals account for 58.4% of Reddit’s web traffic as of June 2024.

Key takeaways

• The Google versus Bing estimates are based on a Similarweb analysis of distinct traffic sources. Reddit gets 58.4% of its traffic from Google but only 0.44% from Bing, according to Similarweb estimates based on desktop web traffic.
• The percentage of reddit.com visits from Google has risen over the past year, topping 50% in September 2023. As recently as June 2023, the share of traffic from Google was under 45%.
• In June, Reddit’s search traffic from Google was driven by more than 36 million keywords. One reason Reddit content appears so prominently in Google search is that searchers have taken to adding the word “reddit” to other searches like “reddit soccer” (a source of 452.9K clicks) and “elden ring reddit” (224.3K).

Reddit gets significantly more search visitors than direct visitors

As of June 2024, Reddit was getting only a little more than a third of its traffic from people entering reddit.com into their browser, compared with close to 60% from Google search, based on desktop web traffic.

Reddit gets more than 60% of worldwide traffic from search

Google accounts for most, but not all, of the 61.28% of total traffic (including mobile web) that comes from search engines, as opposed to direct access or other referral sources.

Google search traffic has risen over the past year

The share of traffic to reddit.com from Google search has increased significantly over the past year. Bing’s share has also increased slightly, while remaining under 1%.

In addition to being a source of AI training data, Reddit is valuable to Google and other search engines as a source of authentic conversation about news, opinions, products, and trends in society. That’s particularly true as more users of search engines make a habit of specifically including search along with other keywords when seeking out information on specific topics.

Keywords driving Google desktop web referrals to reddit.com, June 2024, worldwide

Bing is growing, but still far smaller

One reason Reddit referral traffic from Bing is so much smaller is simply that Bing’s audience remains far smaller than Google’s.

Bing has been growing, and its June traffic was up 6% year-over-year on a worldwide basis. Still, Google is more than 50 times bigger by total traffic. But the gap in terms of share of referrals is even bigger, over 100 times greater.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".