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Reddit's own AI search

Reddit's own AI search

Reddit has introduced it's own AI lead search feature + Another surprise core update.

Kartik Maan
December 15, 2024

Writing these newsletters has become one of the very things that i look upto whole week. The sense of connectedness and purpose it gives me has really been something that i have been looking for quite some time, and i really hope that everyone that receives these newsletters have been able to get some sort of value out of the publications.

With that out of the way, in today’s edition we have got something really special - A lot of tips and valuable content that you can take action around to make the holy gods of SEO shine upon you.

In today’s edition:

Programmatic SEO - what it is and how to leverage it
Google’s December core Update
New to SEO? - follow these steps to get started
Reddit’s new AI search feature
Google has been making some interesting changing to the search results lately.
This edition’s recommended reads

Programmatic SEO

You would find millions upon millions of guides, ebooks, videos explaining what it is and how to do it. So i won’t be going heavily into the details and give you a very complex definition of what it is, instead i would explain it to you in a way that it sticks with you.

What is it?

Complex definition - Programmatic SEO is the art of leveraging data-driven automation to create thousands of highly targeted, intent-specific landing pages at scale. By dynamically combining structured datasets with carefully crafted content templates, we generate comprehensive pages that capture long-tail search opportunities across multiple semantic variations. This strategy exploits search engines' granular intent-matching while maintaining contextual relevance - essentially creating a vast net of hyper-specific entry points that aggregate into significant search visibility. The real power lies in the compound effect: each page may target micro-intents, but collectively they build topical authority and capture previously untapped search demand.

Yeah…. You didn’t read all that, because neither would I.

Simpler version - Programmatic SEO is automatically creating many website pages that help you appear in more Google searches.

— That is all that you need to know.

How to do it?

Find what can you create hundreds of page about - Find a niche or a topic you can create hundreds of even thousands of pages around. For eg. think like a payment aggregator that allows accepting international payments.
Identify the patterns - Find out how do people search for the keywords you are targeting. For eg. Accept {payment type} payments. {Currency} to {Currency} etc.
Create a template page - Pick one niche, one pattern and create an absolutely great page that you are really proud of, then turn it into a template with multiple places that will act as variables that we can change. For eg. you can treat {location} as a variable and have that change in every landing page.
Create the pages - After having all that set up, based on the platform you have set up - Wordpress, framer, webflow, custom code. Go ahead and automate these pages and publish these spread out comfortably through some days or weeks depending on the number of pages.

Why does it matter?

More Pages = More traffic = More visibility = More conversions.

Some Examples

Wise - Has got over 300k+ currency converter pages in multiple pages. Traffic - 50M/mo
Product hunt - Thousands of pages that show you product alternatives. Traffic - 52k/mo
Monday - Hundreds of template pages for their product. Traffic - 14k/mo
G2 - Over 130k+ pages for reviews, comparisons, features etc. Traffic - 800k/mo
Booking - Millions of pages for every city, state, country. Traffic - 91M/mo
Webflow - Webflow has thousands of industry wise website template landing pages. Traffic - 45k/mo

December core update

Again?, that is exactly what my reaction was when i got to know that they have released yet another core update on 13th of December. Just after they finished rolling out the November core update, we get yet another core update. Let’s dissect it and see what’s happening, what it is, what should you do.

What’s happening

Google's rolling out its latest core update (started December 12th) and it'll take about two weeks to fully implement. With this update, like some of the older ones they are taking a moment to fine tune their search results and what they want to show.

What it is

It's a global update affecting all languages
Impacts all types of content
Affects Google Discover and featured snippets too
Not a penalty system - it's about rewarding great content

What Should You Do?

Don't panic! This is a normal update
Focus on creating genuinely helpful content
Review your existing content - is it truly solving user problems?
Keep track of your rankings over the next few weeks
Think user-first, SEO second

New to SEO

Being new to SEO can be overwhelming. Setting up tools, conversion tags etc. Here are the absolute first 5 steps that you can follow to get you up and running in no time.

Install Google analytics + Google search console
Check what keywords competitors rank for
Write 5 high quality blog posts targeting those keywords
Optimise your website speed and mobile experience and fix all the technical issues
Get your first 10 quality backlinks from business directories.

Want to save these steps? Here are the steps in form of an image for your easy access.

Reddit’s new AI search

One things for sure, Google has been pushing Reddit’s posts in their search result for quite some time now and it is one of the ways people search for reviews and recommendations as they trust communities more than other websites. It drove Reddit quite a great amount of traffic and they’s been enjoying it for quite some time.

So what does Reddit do? they are launching an AI based search feature that allows you to do query based searches for their own platform. Yup that’s right, a search feature that let’s you ‘search’ deeply on reddit using ‘AI’.

The feature is not out for the public as of now, but some publishers and testers have got access to it. Here is how it actually looks like:

Source - The Verge

The one way that it is better than Google to show results is that, while google gives you direct links in the search results, it gives you summaries and links to the original post in a much efficient manner. Chances are that it gives you Reddit based results faster than Google, as it does not have to wait for the pages/posts to be crawled (like how it happens with Google).

Where did we see it before? Yup that’s right, Open ai’s Search GPT does the same - searches the internet - gives you summaries - links the sources.

This feature is something like that, but limited to content on Reddit.

New changes to Search results.

Google has been on fire quite lately, making a lot of changes - To how they crawl, what they show, how they show and some other updates. One major update that they have been rolling out quietly is related to the search results. Here’s some new changes they’ve been making

Labels

Google has been experimenting with these feature, where they show some certain labels over and around the search results. For example - if you search running shoes, it shows some labels like:

Popular with: Where it shows whom are the people this search result is most popular with, in this case - Shoppers, shopping enthusiasts.

Source - Brodie Clark

Trending this week: Showing which results have been popular/trending for the time frame Google wants to showcase.