Speaking for Google, Jennifer Kutz told The Verge that Reddit “gets no special preference” in ranking or in the company’s AI search features, and said Google has “kept results 99% spam-free for years.” Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the remarks on August 5, the same week Reddit told investors its search referral traffic had turned volatile. Search Engine Journal, covering Reddit’s earnings call that day, adds a third fact: Reddit is building toward needing Google less.
Kutz’s fuller answer to The Verge addressed spam directly. “There will always be bad actors trying to game the system - in fact, spamming predates the internet - and fighting spam is a core expertise for us,” she wrote in an email to the publication. She added that forums such as Reddit carry a mix of high and low quality content, and that Google’s systems are built to tell the difference.
The denial is narrower than it first reads. Kutz said Reddit gets “no special preference,” not that Google gives it no preference whatsoever, a distinction a reader raised directly beneath Schwartz’s report. That gap cannot be closed from outside Google’s ranking systems. What can be checked is the paperwork. Until May 15, 2026, nothing in the written spam policies said they covered generative answers at all. On that date the company folded AI Overviews and AI Mode, its conversational search experience, into the same rules covering scaled content abuse, inauthentic mentions and site reputation abuse.
A commercial arrangement sits underneath the ranking question. The two companies struck a data licensing deal back in February 2024, put at somewhere near $60 million annually, and it gave Google effective exclusivity in indexing recent Reddit content while a robots.txt disallow directive kept most other crawlers out. Paying for training data and tuning a ranking algorithm are separate acts, and Kutz’s statement does not require either to be false for the other to be true.
Reddit’s own results argue against a favoritism read. The platform took losses through the May 2026 core update, completed June 2, and the June 2026 spam update, completed June 26, with search consultant Glenn Gabe reporting AI-translated Reddit pages trending downward in Germany and Italy afterward. Reddit’s stock fell 12.49% in after-hours trading following second-quarter results that included advertising revenue of $762 million, up 64%, and total revenue of $804.9 million. United States daily uniques grew 6% to 53.2 million against a stated target of 100 million, and executives described search referral traffic late in the quarter as volatile.
That volatility is shaping how Reddit negotiates, not just how it reports results. The company was named in July 2026 among publishers weighing whether to block Google’s crawler outright, with its licensing agreement itself up for renewal. On August 3, 2026, chief executive Steve Huffman said commercial use of Reddit’s data requires commercial terms, a position that casts Reddit as a supplier setting price rather than a platform coasting on favor.
Reddit’s own ambitions, reported the same day by Search Engine Journal, point toward independence from Google. On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Huffman said Reddit intends to surface more of what Search Engine Journal described as its “massive amount of evergreen content,” including recommendations and product reviews, inside its feeds. Pressed on the feed’s direction, he argued that “any query where you want to know something or want to see multiple perspectives, like what should I watch? What do people think about this? What should I buy? Reddit … provides the best answers on the internet.”
That ambition runs into a stated limit. Search Engine Journal reported that Reddit’s feed is currently bottlenecked by what the outlet described as “small models,” which restrict recommendations to recent activity. Huffman told analysts that “posts that are eligible for recommendation, Reddit right now is limited to a week,” even though much of the platform’s archive, parenting advice, book and movie reviews among it, stays relevant far longer. He said fixing that gives Reddit “sometimes order of magnitude improvement opportunity” on candidate selection and model size over the next year. Chief operating officer Jen Wong separately described plans to tie search results to shopping, through product-image modules and multi-retailer advertising units.
Three things are true at once. Google says Reddit receives no special ranking treatment. Reddit’s own traffic and stock reaction show a platform absorbing pressure regardless. And Reddit is now telling investors that it wants to answer more queries itself rather than wait for Google to send the click. Search teams tracking Reddit citations should watch the feed rebuild as closely as the ranking dispute: once the week-long eligibility limit lifts, Reddit’s evergreen recommendation and review content becomes a direct competitor for the same commercial queries publishers currently rank for, independent of whatever Google decides about preference.
Reporting by Luis Rijo for PPC Land, published August 5, 2026, on Jennifer Kutz’s statement to The Verge and Barry Schwartz’s report for Search Engine Roundtable, with additional reporting by Roger Montti for Search Engine Journal on Reddit’s August 2026 second-quarter earnings call.
