Plenty Google Search users were appending “site:reddit.com” to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called “Perspectives”. Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).
This means that those search users won’t beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there’s a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit’s competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).
Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.
In case you thought Google was doing this for users, you should know that this “Perspectives” thing has been in the works for months, they just thought now was a good time to bring it out. Unlike Reddit, Google has a really good PR team.
Of course it is not for the users - Alphabet is as malicious as Reddit, perhaps more. It’s just that as you said it has a good PR team, so their maliciousness is not so obvious.