Reddit Dominates Search Rankings After May Core Update
▼ Summary
– After the May core update, Reddit’s top 3 presence in SE Ranking’s analysis of 100,000 keywords rose to 10.24%, with its #1 spot count increasing 54% from March.
– Reddit’s largest gains were in experience-led niches like Pets, Education, and Sports, while YMYL niches like Healthcare and Real Estate saw minimal change.
– YouTube’s share of top 3 organic results dropped to 2.14% after May, as its content may be appearing more in video SERP features rather than regular blue links.
– After May’s update, 32.20% of domains that lost top 10 positions in March recovered, while 17% of current top 10 domains are new to the dataset.
– The data, from SE Ranking’s tracking of 100,000 keywords from one US location, excludes SERP features and combines the March spam and core updates into one comparison window.
An SE Ranking analysis of 100,000 keywords reveals that Reddit significantly expanded its search presence after the May core update, capturing a larger share of top positions across all 20 tracked niches. The data, drawn from SE Ranking’s own keyword-monitoring platform, shows the platform’s strongest growth in categories where users seek personal experiences and recommendations.
Reddit’s overall top 3 share climbed to 10.24% after May, up from 8.56% following the March update and 9.19% after December. This means roughly one in every ten top search results now belongs to Reddit. The platform also claimed the number one spot more frequently, holding it for 13,872 keywords after May,a 54% increase from the 8,993 top results it held after March.
The most dramatic gains appeared in experience-driven niches. Pets saw a jump of 3.18 percentage points, rising from 14.87% to 18.05%. Education increased by 3.03 points (10.46% to 13.49%), while Sports and Exercise climbed 3.02 points (9.75% to 12.77%). E-Commerce and Retail also grew notably, up 2.61 points to 14.11%.
In contrast, Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories showed minimal movement. Healthcare inched up just 0.40 points to 1.33%, Real Estate edged up 0.06 points to 3.73%, and News and Politics rose 0.78 points to 3.53%. This pattern diverges from the March core update, when Amsive found Reddit and similar user-generated content sites lost search visibility in the U. S. while brand sites gained. SE Ranking’s own March data had shown Reddit’s top 3 share declining from December levels, but the May figures reversed that trend.
YouTube’s organic presence, meanwhile, declined. Its top 3 share dropped to 2.14% after May, down from 2.50% after March and 2.40% after December. The data suggests that YouTube results may be appearing more frequently in video SERP features rather than standard organic blue links, which are the only ones counted in this analysis. As a result, any YouTube visibility in video carousels or other features goes unmeasured.
Top 3 monopolies,where a single domain holds all three top spots for a keyword,fell to 1.99% of keywords after May, down from 3.24% after March. YouTube remains the domain most likely to achieve a monopoly, but its share of those keywords dropped slightly from 15.5% after March to 15.4% after May.
Looking at volatility and recovery, SE Ranking found that May’s results landed between March and December. After May, 76.03% of top 3 URLs changed position, and 88.39% of top 10 URLs shifted. Both figures were lower than March but higher than December. About one in five top 10 pages (19.87%) disappeared from the top 100 entirely, compared to 24.10% after March and 14.70% after December.
Recovery rates paint a sobering picture. Only 32.20% of domains that lost their top 10 positions after March managed to reclaim them after May. The other 67.80% have not returned. Meanwhile, 17% of domains currently in the top 10 are entirely new, having never appeared in any of SE Ranking’s three snapshots.
What this analysis does not cover is worth noting. The data tracks organic blue links for 100,000 keywords from a single U. S. location in New York. SE Ranking has used the same keyword set across three core updates, making cross-update comparisons more consistent than a one-off analysis, but results might differ for other regions or keyword sets. The figures also exclude SERP features, so the full picture is likely larger than these numbers suggest, especially for YouTube. Additionally, the “March” comparison in SE Ranking’s dataset combines the March spam update and core update, which rolled out within days of each other, making it impossible to isolate which update caused specific changes.
Why this matters comes down to the niche-level breakdown. Hearing that Reddit is growing in search results means little if you work in healthcare, where its top 3 share barely moved from 0.93% to 1.33%. But it is a critical development for those in the pets niche, where Reddit now commands 18% of top 3 positions. The recovery data is equally telling: two-thirds of domains that dropped in March still haven’t bounced back. For sites still recovering, the May update shows that another core update does not guarantee a rebound.
Looking ahead, the comparison after the next core update will help clarify whether the gap between YMYL and experience-led niches remains consistent. That data will be essential for understanding how Google continues to prioritize user-generated content in search results.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
