Just days after Google Search completed the rollout of its first core update of 2025, SEO experts have pointed out that AI-translated content on Reddit appears to be climbing the search engine’s rankings.
Millions of AI-translated Reddit posts are ranking on Google Search in certain countries, according to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) consultant Glenn Gabe. “It looks like Reddit is surging again with the March core update. I know that’s hard to believe since it has skyrocketed in visibility since the fall of 2023, but I am seeing more surges across countries,” Gabe wrote in a blog post published on Thursday, March 27.
It took Google over two weeks to complete the rollout of its core update released on March 13. These updates to Google Search’s core algorithms and systems are released several times a year. While the company’s web page assures site owners that they do not need to worry about changes in traffic, core updates generally tend to correlate with surges and drops across various verticals and countries.
For instance, Lily Ray, senior vice-president of SEO strategy for marketing agency Amsive, flagged “major drops” in search traffic to forum sites like Quora following the completion of the March core update rollout.
After 1.5 years of major visibility surges for thousands of forums, I am seeing early signs of major drops among some forum sites..
This is a small sample, but a pretty clear trend IMO. pic.twitter.com/zmWjtvpSkK
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) March 26, 2025
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However, Reddit appears to have bucked this trend by explicitly allowing the crawling of AI-translated user posts in its robots.txt files for Google and other search engines. Hence, AI-translated content on the social media platform is much more visible across languages and countries, Gabe said.
As per screenshots shared by Gabe, Reddit content translated to French using AI led to a 28.96 per cent surge in traffic in March 2025, with a total traffic of 8.2 million and 3.7 million total keywords ranked (up by 14.5 per cent).
I wasn’t planning on writing this, but had to after seeing this yesterday -> Reddit AI translations have scaled across languages and Google rankings are booming
OK, yesterday @lilyraynyc shared that she was seeing many forums drop with the March core update. I agree and have… pic.twitter.com/cBvtLzQzR3
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 27, 2025
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Reddit’s AI translation feature
Reddit made its debut on the stock market in March last year. In the publicly traded company’s first-ever earnings call, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced plans to leverage large language models (LLMs) for real-time translation of the site’s content, starting with French.
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Since then, Reddit has expanded its AI-powered translations to more than 35 countries, including Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, the Philippines, and countries throughout Latin America, as per its blog post. While the platform already allowed users to choose their preferred content language for post recommendations, its latest feature uses AI to auto-translate both posts and corresponding comments to the language set by the user in their account settings.
With this AI translation feature, Reddit aimed to drive user growth and revenue outside the US. Speaking on the earnings call, Huffman said, “We’re still 50/50 US versus non-US, but our peers are more than 80% to 90% non-US. I think there’s a huge opportunity there.”
“So we’re translating our entire corpus today that is mostly in English into the other languages and hope that will help accelerate international growth,” he added.
In a letter to shareholders last month, Huffman said that Reddit had experienced some volatility with Google Search that had been triggered by a periodic algorithm change. “Search traffic has recovered so far in Q1, and we’ve regained momentum,” he clarified.
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According to Huffman, the fluctuation in referrals from search traffic primarily affects logged-out users of the platform. While Reddit’s daily active unique (DAU) visitors rose 39 per cent to 101.7 million in the fourth quarter of last year, it missed analysts’ average estimate of 103.3 million DAU visitors, leading to a 15 per cent decline in share price in extended trading on February 12, 2025.
Why it matters
The rise of AI-translated content on Reddit in Google Search rankings appears to contradict the search giant’s existing policy on scaled content abuse and spam.
As per the policy, “Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymising, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users” counts as scaled content abuse.
“Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users” is also cited as an attempt to manipulate search rankings and not help users. Gabe said that other sites with auto-translated content have faced manual actions or algorithmic demotion by Google for violating its spam guidelines in the past.
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“Most sites cannot get away with mass-translating content via AI (or machine translation tools) without getting hammered by Google,” he said. The Google Search visibility numbers for AI-translated content on Reddit shows that the social media platform might be an exception to the rule.
Last year, Reddit signed an AI content licensing agreement with Google. As part of the $60 million per year contract, Google is allowed to use content on Reddit to train its AI models.
We have reached out to Google and Reddit for comment. This report will be updated with their responses if received.
