Our recent analysis of 145M US Google search results found the ‘Discussions and forums’ feature present in 16.93M (11.7%) of them.
The most prominent domain was Reddit.com, which showed up in 87.8% of SERPs (83.9% worldwide), with an average of 1.29 link appearances.
Along with Ahrefs’ data scientist Xibeijia Guan, I set out to uncover how prominent other sites were, whether young forums appeared, and the impact backlinks might have on results.
Key takeaways
- Just three sites account for 76.75% of all Discussions and forums links worldwide
- After Reddit, the most prominent domains by feature appearances were Facebook (38.3%), Quora (32%), JustAnswer (8.2%), and Mayo Clinic (3.3%)
- 98.7% of Discussions and forums appearances are for queries with Informational intent
- The SERP feature is most prominent in the US, Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and the UK
- Facebook overtook Quora’s prominence for the first time in January of 2026
- The youngest site in the top 1,000 domains overall is 3 years and 11 months old
- There was no correlation between backlinks to individual threads and how often they showed up in results
Reddit appears in 83.9% of results, with an average inclusion rate of 89.3% over the past two years
When the Discussions and forums SERP feature was present, it included a link to Reddit 83.9% of the time, regardless of country.
We’re still collecting data for August, but early results show it has grown to appear in 86.1% of results so far.
The popular discussion platform was the most prevalent domain in 34 countries, and ranked highly elsewhere, in countries like India (#2) and South Africa (#2).
In those instances, Quora and Facebook are more prominent, respectively.
I also looked at the top 100 most prevalent subreddits, curious whether a new or inactive community has shown up in more Google search results than might be expected.
Their average age was 16 years and 1 month. The youngest overall was r/ScienceBasedParenting, created 8 years ago.
The subreddit with the fewest members was /r/backpain, with 81,027.
The subreddit with the fewest weekly visitors at the time of checking was /r/wichita, with 42,000. It describes itself as the subreddit “for residents of Kansas’ largest city”.
Nothing surprising broke through to the top 100. I know from researching niche topics that smaller, newer communities can appear, but they aren’t among the most prominent communities across all of Reddit.
Using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, you can easily find the most prominent communities and subreddits most relevant to the industry you’re in.
How to find the top ranking forums in your industry
With Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, create or open a list of keywords most relevant to your business. These could include the products and services you sell, the guides you’ve written, or anything else you want your brand to show up for.
You can then apply the Discussions and forums SERP filter to show only the keywords where the feature appeared, and dive into the rankings behind each.
As a pro tip, you can also click on the ‘By page’ filter, then search for forum identifiers like forum, community, showthread, or /r/ (for Reddit).
If you don’t want to do this manually, you could also export the top URLs across all keywords and ask your AI assistant of choice to list domains by the most forum URLs that appear.
Just three sites account for 76.75% of all ‘Discussions and forums’ link appearances worldwide
The Discussions and forums SERP feature can include multiple sites and multiple links from the same site.
The top 10 domains accounted for 84.87% of all links in our research, while the top 100 domains accounted for 91.51%.
Domains ranked from 501 to 1,000 contribute only 1.49% of the overall visibility.
The top 1,000 domains overall accounted for 96.81% of mentions, with just 2.19M additional links remaining across all additional names, in all countries.
Thanks to Groups, Facebook is the second most prevalent site overall
In the US, Facebook appeared in 38.3% of all instances of the SERP feature, and that stat stays the same across all countries.
Posts in public Facebook Groups, which officially launched in October 2010, were responsible for all Facebook URLs that appeared.
While it’s possible they’re also being rewritten based on my search query, it’s interesting to see Google picking up the exact AI-generated page headline directly from Facebook: