Cult of the New: Google Chased the Shiny Thing and Handed Your Spot to a Stranger

For about twenty years, Google ran on a contract. Build something real, answer the question better than the next site, and you get the spot. It was slow and it was frustrating and it mostly worked. I built an agency on that contract. I took a Chicagoland landscaper from three crews to nine, $1.2 million to over $10 million, and a large share of that was pages that earned their ranking by being the best answer on the internet for what that customer typed.

That contract is broken. Not bent. Broken.

After Google’s May 2026 core update, Reddit’s share of the top three positions climbed to 10.24%, up from 8.56% after the March update. The number of keywords where Reddit holds the number one result went from 8,993 to 13,872. That is a 54% jump in the top spot, in one update. One in ten of Google’s most valuable positions now belongs to a forum.

Why did Google hand the top spot to a forum?

Because new felt like progress, and nobody checked the cost.

We poured AI into tools that worked for two decades. Not because they were failing. Because new is intoxicating and standing still looks like dying. Google went overboard, dropped its guardrails, and rebuilt ranking around a shiny idea before it understood what the idea would do in the wild.

The framing is that this is a trust-first move toward lived experience. Real people who used the thing, instead of a polished blog that only sounds expert. That is a reasonable instinct. It is also a system that cannot tell a real experience from a manufactured one, and now does not appear to try.

The tool got less trustworthy the more intelligence it added. Sit with that one.

It is not Reddit’s fault

Reddit is fine. Say it plainly, because the entire industry spent two months yelling at the wrong building.

Reddit is doing what a forum does. People show up, argue about mattresses, and sometimes tell the truth. That was useful long before Google decided to crown it. Google reportedly pays about $60 million a year for access to that data, which tells you something about how badly it wanted the ingredient.

The failing belongs to the company that chased the new without building the guardrails. An analysis of 10,000 product-review keyphrases found Reddit surfacing 97.5% of the time, with more than half of the top-ranked threads examined carrying affiliate links in the comments. That is not a forum winning on merit. That is a door left open.

Every new system has an exploit, and this one is getting strip-mined

Name the weakness and you can watch it happen in real time. Seeded threads. Planted reviews. Hit pieces with a competitor’s brand name in the title, written to rank.

Every system has a hole. The question is only how fast it gets found and how fast it gets patched, and the finders are running laps around the patchers. The weakness stopped being a bug in the product. For a certain kind of operator, the weakness is the product.

The small owner eats it

The person who loses here is the one who did everything the old rules asked.

Limited time. Limited budget. No agency retainer, no growth team, no subreddit strategy. They wrote the honest service page. They answered the question. They waited out the marathon like every SEO told them to, because SEO is a marathon and the site is a digital salesperson, and then a rule change they never saw coming took the spot and handed it to a thread from someone who used the product once in 2023.

They cannot win the race to exploit either. Tell a two-person shop to go seed Reddit and you have handed them a fight against operators with budget and headcount who will out-post them by Tuesday. The exploit is not a lifeline for the small owner. It is one more race they lose.

If you want a move that is not the exploit, it is the boring one, and it is the same one I have been repeating: get mentioned in more places, repeat the same real numbers, and pull people onto something you own. Being the most mentioned is how you land in the answer now, because the machine counts mentions instead of crowning a winner. And the list is the only audience nobody can reprice on you. That is the whole logic of the Eight Dominoes: the sequence you control beats the tactic you rent.

The real loss is not the traffic

The part that bothers me is not the rankings.

We outsourced the choice.

We stopped picking things for ourselves. What to buy, who to trust, which answer is true. We handed the choosing to a machine, and the machine is tuned for the new. So it picks the new. Every time. Over the true, over the tested, over the thing that has worked for twenty years and does not photograph well.

I do not think Google comes back from this. Not to a place where you can trust website ranking. Once the new gets rewarded, the exploiters move faster than the guardrails, and the internet we get on the other side is worse than the one we had. That is not a prediction I enjoy making. I have made a living on that system.

So build what does not depend on it. Not because the tactics stopped working, but because a foundation you cannot trust is not a foundation. You can ride a channel. You cannot ride a foundation.

New is not better. It is just new. There is no spell here. Go own something.