Bulk AI translations helped wipe 29% off Reddit's value
The company had called its machine translated pages Google-approved, and now says they were not.
Reddit's stock closed down 29.27% on Friday, its worst day since the company went public in 2024, after it forecast weak fourth quarter revenue. Glenn Gabe, who has been tracking the story, points to three things stacking up at once.
First, Reddit's AI translated pages were hammered by Google algorithm updates (the changes Google makes to how it ranks pages). Second, AI Overviews, the AI written answers at the top of Google results, keep expanding and eating clicks that used to go to websites. Third, Reddit plans to start forcing people to log in to read.
The translation part is the bit that matters for your site. Reddit had described those machine translated pages as Google-approved. Gabe says the company now admits they were not, and they got hit. We covered the ranking damage earlier, before the share price caught up with it.
Why this lands on a small business
Translating your pages into other languages with a machine, publishing them in bulk, and leaving them alone is the pattern that got hit here. It is the same shape as any mass produced page, thousands of near identical URLs with words swapped and nobody checking whether the result actually answers anything. Reddit is enormous and it still was not big enough to be exempt.
This is not a warning about writing articles, or about using AI to help you write them. It is a warning about publishing at a scale where no human ever reads the output.
Barry Schwartz summed up the reaction from the industry in five words, and it was not sympathy.
What to do
If you run language versions of your site, open a few of the translated pages and read them. If they read like a machine produced them and nobody fixed them, either rewrite the ones that matter or take the rest down. If you only publish in one language, do nothing here.
The wider point is the second item on Gabe's list. AI Overviews expanding and taking clicks is now a line item big enough to show up in a public company's revenue forecast. Nobody has a fix for that, and the sources do not offer one. But it is a reminder that traffic you used to count on from search is not guaranteed, and the pages that survive are the ones with something on them worth reading.
Every SEO on the planet knew this would happen eventually
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.