Using Quora for SEO means working with the question-and-answer platform in two ways: as an archive of real questions to mine for keywords and content, and as a shop window where your name shows up in Google's results and among the sources of AI answers. As a source of links it's worth very little. And how much it's worth as a shop window depends a lot on the market, far more than the American guides on page one suggest.
To find out how much, on 4 October 2026 we ran 40 typical questions through Google in Italian for Italy and the same 40 in English for the United States, counting where Quora and Reddit appeared. In Italy Quora was on page one in 15% of cases, in the US in 35%. Reddit, in the same Italian sample, was at 50%. On 10 October we added a smaller check on Google UK: 5 of the same questions, where Quora appeared twice, and only ever inside the "Discussions and forums" block, while Reddit was among the organic results four times.
What Quora is, and why people are talking about it again
Quora is a question-and-answer site founded in 2009 by Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever and opened to the public in June 2010. Versions in other languages followed, including Italian, it.quora.com, which launched in beta in May 2017 (the dates are on Quora's Wikipedia page). Since 2023 the same company has also run Poe, an app that gives access to several chatbots.
For years marketers treated it as a minor channel. The reason it's back in SEO discussions is artificial intelligence: Quora answers are long, signed texts organised by question, which is exactly the material systems like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity pick up when they build an answer. If you want the bigger picture on how these citations work, it's in our guide to citations in AI answers.
How often Quora appears in the SERPs: our test on 40 questions
The test is simple. We chose 40 queries phrased as questions, spread across consumer topics ("how to choose a mattress", "best bluetooth headphones"), work ("how to ask for a pay rise"), technology ("why is my computer slow") and small business ("which management software to choose for an SME", "best crm for small business"). For each one we downloaded Google's desktop page one with DataForSEO, once in Italian with Italy as the location and once in English with the United States as the location. The queries are the same in both markets, so the difference comes from the market and not from the choice of topics.
| What we measured (40 queries per market, desktop page one, 4 October 2026) | Italy | United States |
|---|---|---|
| Queries with Quora among the organic results | 6 (15%) | 14 (35%) |
| Queries with Quora in any block (organic or "Discussions and forums") | 6 (15%) | 21 (52.5%) |
| Queries with Reddit among the organic results | 20 (50%) | 30 (75%) |
| Queries with Reddit in any block | 20 (50%) | 35 (87.5%) |
| Queries with the "Discussions and forums" block | 0 | 16 (40%) |
| Queries with an AI Overview | 35 (87.5%) | 40 (100%) |
| Average best position for Quora, when present | 8.2 | 7.1 |
| Average best position for Reddit, when present | 3.5 | 4.0 |
Three things stand out straight away.
In Italy Quora sits at the bottom of the page. When it appears, its best position is 8.2 on average: nearly always among the last results. All six Italian appearances were it.quora.com pages, none from the English version. The Italian community exists and is indexed, but Google uses it as filler, not as the main answer.
Reddit takes the space the two share in the US. On half the Italian queries there's at least one Reddit thread, with an average best position of 3.5, and in first place three times. The odd part is where those threads come from: almost all are discussions started in English on American subreddits and machine-translated (the URL ends in ?tl=it). There were few exceptions, for instance r/ItaliaPersonalFinance on the queries about renting and solar panels, and r/Universitaly on the one about master's degrees.
The "Discussions and forums" block never appeared in Italy. In the US it showed up on 16 of 40 queries and contained Quora in 11 cases: for 7 of those queries, that block was the only place Quora was visible. Anyone reading an American guide to Quora is counting on that shop window too, and in our Italian sample it never appeared.
On Google UK, on 10 October 2026, we repeated 5 of the 40 questions in British English ("how to choose a mattress", "how to ask for a pay rise", "best crm for small business", "why is my computer so slow", "is it worth buying a refurbished iphone"). The UK looks much more like the US than Italy. Reddit was among the organic results on 4 of the 5, with an average best position of 5.5. Only one of those threads came from a British subreddit (r/AskUK), although a second one, from r/careerguidance, carried links to r/AskUK and r/UKJobs threads underneath. The "Discussions and forums" block appeared on 3 of the 5. Quora appeared twice, on the slow computer and the refurbished iPhone questions, and both times only inside that block, never as an organic result. Every query had an AI Overview. Five queries are a sample, not a measurement, but they point the same way as the US data: in English-language markets Quora's visibility depends heavily on the forums block.
A note on method: SERPs move. When we repeated one of the Italian queries an hour later ("is it worth buying a refurbished iphone"), Quora had disappeared and Reddit had dropped from first to fifth. Forty queries capture a trend, not a stable ranking. To read the structure of a results page properly, our guide to the SERP may help.
How much quora.com weighs on Google UK
The question tests show how often Quora is visible. To see how much it matters overall, we looked at DataForSEO Labs estimates for the UK market, which measure how many keywords a domain ranks for and how much organic traffic it gets from them.
| Google UK, DataForSEO Labs estimate (October 2026) | quora.com | reddit.com |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords ranking in the top 100 results | 2,574,990 | 7,672,067 |
| Keywords in the top 10 results | 834,511 | 5,295,206 |
| Keywords in first position | 26,329 | 859,713 |
| Estimated monthly organic traffic | about 19.2 million visits | about 199.4 million visits |
Reddit has more than six times as many page-one keywords in the UK as Quora, and more than 30 times as many first positions. That said, Quora isn't standing still: between May and October 2026, according to the same tool's history, quora.com's estimated UK traffic rose from about 14.2 million to about 19.2 million visits a month, and its top-10 keywords from 604,929 to 834,511, even though the total number of keywords it ranks for fell from 3.2 million to 2.6 million. It's ranking for fewer queries, but higher up. For comparison, in Italy it.quora.com has about 24,000 keywords in the top 10, against Reddit's 687,000.
Quora and AI answers: what the studies say, and what they don't
The figure that gets quoted most is this: Quora is supposedly the most cited site in Google's AI Overviews. It comes from a Semrush study published on 21 July 2025, in which Quora is first and Reddit second, ahead of LinkedIn, YouTube and the New York Times. Quora promoted it on its site for advertisers. The detail that gets lost along the way is the sample: the study analysed more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics, and doesn't state the country. It applies to people in marketing, probably in English, not to every sector.
The other two studies available scale the figure down:
- Profound analysed 680 million citations collected between August 2024 and June 2025. In AI Overviews Quora accounts for 1.5% of all citations, behind Reddit (2.2%) and YouTube (1.9%). On Perplexity Reddit rises to 6.6%, and on ChatGPT the most cited source is Wikipedia, at 7.8%.
- Semrush, in November 2025, tracked 230,000 prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity for thirteen weeks, from 14 July to 12 October 2025, for more than 100 million citations. On ChatGPT the share of answers citing Reddit fell from almost 60% in early August to about 10% by mid-September. On AI Mode, Medium, Quora and LinkedIn were the domains that lost the most.
None of the three studies states a UK-specific sample, so read them as data for the English-language market as a whole. The lesson that holds up is a different one: the sources the models prefer change within weeks, for reasons you don't control. Building your AI visibility on a single third-party site is fragile. The levers that stay in your hands are covered in our guide to AI visibility and, for Google, in the one on AI Overviews.
What it's actually good for: four uses that work in any market
1. Finding the questions people ask in their own words
This is the most solid use, and it works even if you never write an answer. Quora questions are written by people, with their own vocabulary and doubts, and are often more specific than what a keyword research tool returns. Two searches are enough to get started: site:quora.com "crm" small business uk to see what people ask about a topic, and site:reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance "pension" to see how the same kind of question is discussed in a British community.
Many of these questions have volumes that tools show as zero or close to it. They're the classic long tail: few searches, very clear intent. If you're not sure how to handle them yet, our guide to long-tail keywords explains when a question deserves its own page and when a section will do.
2. Understanding intent before you write
The most upvoted answers tell you what people consider a good answer: a list, a personal experience, a number, a warning. Reading ten of them before writing an article helps you understand search intent better than any automatic classification. The objections that keep coming up in the comments are ready-made material for the FAQ section. For other ways to research topics, see our guide on how to find blog post ideas.
3. Answering under your own name, where there's room
This is where the market data matters. If a question in your sector already has a Quora page on Google's page one, either as an organic result or in the forums block, a complete answer signed by a real person from your company can get seen both on Google and among AI sources. If it doesn't, writing on Quora to get found on Google is time badly spent: in our small UK check Quora never made it into the organic results, and in Italy it appeared on six questions out of forty.
Answers that hold up have three things in common: they answer in the first sentence, they bring direct experience or a verifiable number, and the profile states the writer's role. It's the same logic as E-E-A-T: whoever writes has to show they know the subject. An answer that ends with "contact us" adds nothing for the reader, and the reader notices.
4. Knowing what's being said about your brand
Questions like "has anyone had experience with X?" are the ones an AI model uses to describe a company. Searching Quora and Reddit regularly for your brand name and your competitors' takes ten minutes and tells you in advance what someone asking ChatGPT about you is going to read. If you find wrong information, a public answer with the correct facts is worth more than a report to the moderators.
Links from Quora: why you shouldn't count on them
Several guides on page one, including SEO.com's, present Quora as a link building tool. It isn't. Google recommends marking links in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts, with the ugc attribute, and says that links with these attributes generally aren't followed. A link in an answer on a discussion platform should be treated as possible referral traffic, not as an authority signal. The difference between the attributes is explained in our guide to nofollow.
In our view there's a practical risk too: to anyone moderating a community, a string of answers that all link to the same site looks a lot like spam. A link makes sense when the linked page genuinely goes deeper into what you wrote, and the answer stands up without it.
Quora or Reddit: where to spend an hour a week
With the numbers above, the choice depends more on the sector than on the platform. This is the table we use to decide.
| Situation | Where to be | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The queries in your sector already show Quora pages on page one, organic or in the forums block | Quora | The shop window exists: before writing, count how many complete answers are already there |
| The queries show Reddit threads from British subreddits | Reddit, in the relevant UK subreddit | Google is looking for a local discussion and already finds one: that's where the conversation happens |
| The queries show Reddit threads from American subreddits | Reddit, in a relevant UK subreddit | Google wants a discussion and falls back on an American one: a thread with British prices, rules and brands answers the searcher better |
| Neither platform appears on your queries | Neither, for SEO | Use them only for question research and put the time into your site |
For the wider picture on social platforms and rankings, there's our guide to social media and SEO.
How to measure whether it's doing anything
Three checks, none of which cost anything. In Google Analytics 4, referral traffic from quora.com tells you how many people came from your answers. In Search Console, the trend in searches containing your brand name is the most honest indirect signal: if being on Quora gets the company known, sooner or later someone searches for it by name. For AI answers, the minimum check is to run, by hand, once a month, the five questions that matter in your sector on ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Mode, and note which sources get cited. The details on Perplexity are in our guide to SEO for Perplexity.
If none of the three numbers has moved after three months, the platform isn't working for you and it's time to stop. If you'd rather set up a strategy for appearing in AI answers that's measured on data, that's the work we do in our SEO for AI service.
Quora and SEO FAQs
It depends on the market. In our test Quora was on page one for 6 of 40 questions in Italy (15%) and 14 in the US (35%). In a smaller UK check it appeared on 2 of 5 questions, only inside the 'Discussions and forums' block. It's still useful for finding questions written by real people and for getting seen on queries where Quora is already on page one.
Hardly ever. Google recommends marking links in user-generated content with the ugc or nofollow attribute, and says these links generally aren't followed. A link in an answer should be seen as a possible source of referral traffic, not as an authority signal.
No. UK users use the English-language quora.com, the same site as the US, while other languages have their own versions, such as it.quora.com in Italian, launched in beta in May 2017. In our Italian test every Quora appearance was an it.quora.com page, none from the English version.
Reddit, for now. According to DataForSEO Labs estimates for October 2026, reddit.com has over six times as many page-one keywords in the UK as quora.com, and in our five-question UK check Reddit was among the organic results four times while Quora never was. Where a British subreddit such as r/AskUK already ranks, that's the place to take part.
It can help, but there's no UK-specific data to prove it. The July 2025 Semrush study that names Quora as the most cited site in AI Overviews covers more than 500 marketing and SEO topics; Profound, across 680 million citations, puts Quora at 1.5% of all AI Overview citations.
There's one effect in our data that the industry rarely notices. When someone asks a practical question, Google often answers with a Reddit thread, and the thread isn't always from their country. In Italy it was nearly always an American discussion, machine-translated, with dollar prices, another country's laws and brands you can't buy there. In the UK the picture is better but not complete: of the four Reddit threads in our check, one came from a British subreddit (r/AskUK) and three from general ones (r/careerguidance, r/sysadmin and r/AppleWhatShouldIBuy). The gap isn't in content generally, it's in discussions written with local experience. A business that answers there, under its own name and with numbers from its own market, often isn't competing with thousands of answers. It's competing with a thread written for someone else.
