So maybe they can afford to be delisted from search engines, because the site is addictive enough to bring back its users – and new ones because it's mentioned everywhere. Like Discord or Facebook, where most content is also unavailable to search engines (although they probably rely much more on the social aspects).
Since the moderator revolt, I've noticed an increase in claims that there is an overwhelming volume of AI-generated content on Reddit coupled with boosting. Either that started with reddit's strike-busting efforts or was made more obvious by it.
Since then, this is becoming far worse. Reddit's front page is dominated by random reposts by random low-karma user accounts that all of a sudden create the top post in the whole Reddit universe. Then there are reposts by other random low-karma user accounts on other subreddit that benefit from the same exact treatment.
I'm convinced that the reddit revolt motivated reddit to take a more direct and involved approach to generating and boosting content, and now the effort targets specific segments. This also includes the creation and boosting of subreddits dedicated to mainstream topics. Regardless of this coming from reddit itself or marketing/PR companies, I would not be surprised if the bulk of this content was machine-generated fluff.
For any sub where people ask a lot of questions it's very annoying. I've already unsubbed from a bunch of subs because I didn't want to see the inane/clueless questions being asked.
I have to assume they're promoting these dumbass questions into peoples feeds because they're precisely the type of content AI will love. People asking questions and humans giving answers, but boy it sure does make the experience as a user worse.