Analysis: Reddit Appears in 83.9% of Google’s Discussions and Forums Results

The most prominent domain was Reddit.com, which showed up in 87.8% of SERPs (83.9% worldwide), with an average of 1.29 link appearances.

Along with Ahrefs’ data scientist Xibeijia Guan, I set out to uncover how prominent other sites were, whether young forums appeared, and the impact backlinks might have on results.

When the Discussions and forums SERP feature was present, it included a link to Reddit 83.9% of the time, regardless of country.

We’re still collecting data for August, but early results show it has grown to appear in 86.1% of results so far.

The popular discussion platform was the most prevalent domain in 34 countries, and ranked highly elsewhere, in countries like India (#2) and South Africa (#2).

In those instances, Quora and Facebook are more prominent, respectively.

I also looked at the top 100 most prevalent subreddits, curious whether a new or inactive community has shown up in more Google search results than might be expected.

Their average age was 16 years and 1 month. The youngest overall was r/ScienceBasedParenting, created 8 years ago.

The subreddit with the fewest members was /r/backpain, with 81,027.

The subreddit with the fewest weekly visitors at the time of checking was /r/wichita, with 42,000. It describes itself as the subreddit “for residents of Kansas’ largest city”.

Nothing surprising broke through to the top 100. I know from researching niche topics that smaller, newer communities can appear, but they aren’t among the most prominent communities across all of Reddit.

Using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, you can easily find the most prominent communities and subreddits most relevant to the industry you’re in.

The Discussions and forums SERP feature can include multiple sites and multiple links from the same site.

The top 10 domains accounted for 84.87% of all links in our research, while the top 100 domains accounted for 91.51%.

Domains ranked from 501 to 1,000 contribute only 1.49% of the overall visibility.

The top 1,000 domains overall accounted for 96.81% of mentions, with just 2.19M additional links remaining across all additional names, in all countries.

In the US, Facebook appeared in 38.3% of all instances of the SERP feature, and that stat stays the same across all countries.

Posts in public Facebook Groups, which officially launched in October 2010, were responsible for all Facebook URLs that appeared.

While it’s possible they’re also being rewritten based on my search query, it’s interesting to see Google picking up the exact AI-generated page headline directly from Facebook:

The top 10 posts appeared for a combined 4,936 queries.

The top 10 Groups accounted for 2.82% of all Facebook’s link placements, and the top 100 for 9.27%.

It wasn’t until January of this year that Facebook overtook Quora for how many search results each shows up in.

While Facebook doesn’t reveal official figures, reports online estimate there are anywhere from 10M-70M active groups on the platform.

Our research found Facebook was the most prominent domain in 4 countries: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Samoa.

It was the second most prominent domain in 23 countries, including the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.

Appearing in 8.22M search results, Quora shows for everything from questions about the cost of plastic surgery to questions about unsending emails in Gmail, and everything in between.

Three of its four most prominent threads were discussing where to watch movies online.

In a number of threads, you’ll find the top answer provided by Quora’s AI Assistant, which appears to have launched around the beginning of 2023.

Like other platforms, I was able to find top comments which had little to do with the query itself, or were overly self-promotional.

It points to a challenge all similar communities will face: Some people will interact in good faith, while others will try to get users’ attention for personal gain.

Across all queries in which the SERP feature was present, here are the top 25 domains overall and how many search results each was found in.

Across the top 1,000 domains overall, I was able to get registration dates for 984. Those missing use a .com.au extension, whereby registration dates are not officially published.

(I checked each of the remaining 16 domains in archive.org to make sure none would potentially be the youngest overall.)

Ranking 190th overall, XDAforums.com was technically the most recently registered domain, at under three years old.

That said, it’s the product of a redirect from forums.xda-developers.com, so that’s not when the forum first launched.

At just under four years old, guitar community The Gear Forum does not appear to have been the product of any redirect.

It ranked 748th worldwide, appearing for 1,200 separate search results.

The average domain age was 21 years and 8 months.

It’s important to note that these ages do not account for forums which may have been built on the domain at a later date, or redirected from elsewhere.

If you’ve been thinking of launching a new forum primarily to have a chance of appearing in this SERP feature, do it because you want to launch a forum and see opportunity in that. Whether or not you might appear.

As we’ve seen from companies like Apple and Microsoft, they can also make sense from a customer support perspective.

While we looked at data across dozens of countries, the Discussions and Forums SERP feature didn’t appear in all of them.

In the countries where we found it showing for at least 10,000 individual queries, it was most prevalent in the United States.

Almost all keywords where the Discussion and forums SERP features appear are informational intent. 40.9% have commercial intent, and just 0.6% have navigational intent.

It’s rare for the SERP feature to appear for queries with just one word, matching just 0.3% of appearances.

The feature’s presence scales with query length. It’s roughly three times more likely to appear on an eight-word search than across all queries.

Of the top 1,000 domains overall, 27 have a single URL that accounts for at least 10% of all times their domain appears in the Discussions and forums SERP feature.

768 of the top 1000 domains rely on a single URL for at least 1% of their overall presence.

A health question on the Gleneagles Hospital website accounted for 67% of all times the site showed up.

A single post in 2020, without any replies, accounted for 30% of the overall presence of the domain skill.jobs in the SERP feature.

Domain Rating, also known as DR, is Ahrefs’ score given to the strength of a site’s backlink profile compared to other domains in our database. It works on a logarithmic scale, meaning the leap from 80 to 81 is much larger than the leap from 50 to 51.

The average domain rating of the top 1000 sites prominent in this SERP feature was 58.3.

We saw a moderate Spearman correlation (ρ=0.38) between prominence and DR, but that was driven almost entirely by the top of the list. The bottom half still has domains with a DR of 90+ alongside those with a DR of <10.

The top 100 domains averaged a DR of 78, while the bottom 100 domains averaged a DR of 48.

I also checked the URL rating of the top 1,000 individual discussions, but found no correlation between rankings and backlinks to a specific URL.

In the top 100 URLs, just 6 had a UR score, and none was higher than 5.

I’ve monitored the Discussions and forums SERP feature for years, so analyzing it at this scale was really exciting.

I wasn’t surprised to see how dominant Reddit is, but I was fascinated by Facebook’s growth and just how reliant some sites are on a small number of URLs to appear.

As this research looked at such a large dataset, my recommendation would be to use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to find the subreddits, groups, and niche forums that are best represented in your industry.

Never go into these communities looking to spam or solely promote yourself. Take the time to learn the general etiquette of how members interact.

As is often the case with Ahrefs, people may already be discussing your products and services, which creates natural opportunities to get involved.