It appears that Google is letting Reddit's AI translated pages rank too well within its search results. This is in addition to Google letting Reddit get a lot of other search visibility, but AI translation, well, that should really not perform so well.
Glenn Gabe wrote this up in detail in his article named Reddit AI translations have scaled across languages and Google rankings are booming. Glenn shows some charts that show the growth of Reddit in various countries and how it can be attributed, in some ways, to the AI translated posts.
To be clear, the charts below show that Reddit's AI-translated content is surging.
But technically, as Glenn noted, this can easily be against Google's scaled content policy, which reads:
Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users
Glenn shared a number of examples of this - here is one of those:
Reddit ranking in Google:
When you click into it, you see it was translated from a different post, all they do is at tl=fr parameter to the URL to translate it:
Glenn shared some new charts with me on X of the continued growth since he posted last week:
Reddit's growth in Google France results:
Reddit's growth in Google Spain results:
As of this morning, yep, still trending up for AI translated results across countries. Below is Spain and France showing visibility of tl=es and tl=FR urls... in those countries. pic.twitter.com/LVd9F0iYRb
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 31, 2025
Yep, over 2M of those urls ranking in the SERPs in Spain and it's going up...
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 31, 2025
So why is Google allowing this? I suspect, it is something Google may shut down at some point? In any event, make sure to read Glenn's full post for more details.
Forum discussion at X.
Update: Seems like the intent is to drive search traffic:
Quick update on the Reddit AI translation situation. I went back and checked the hreflang setup for several urls just to see how many languages Reddit was AI-translating content to. I'm seeing up to *22* different languages. That's more than I thought... and could be leading to… pic.twitter.com/nVqQxdhmNE
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 2, 2025
