Why Google Struggled with Coupon Search in 2025

How often do you turn to Google for coupons, and how many clicks does it take to find one that actually works? Google can be a helpful starting point, but it doesn't always deliver reliable, working codes. Sometimes it takes longer than it should to find real savings.

I'm John, CEO of CouponBirds, and I'd like to explain why Google struggled with coupon search in 2025.

Let's start by looking at the two biggest winners in coupon search during 2025.

Reddit: A Major Surge in Coupon Search Visibility in 2025

Following several Google Core Updates in late 2024 and throughout 2025, a major shift occurred: social platforms, particularly Reddit, saw a substantial boost in their visibility on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for coupon-related queries. This happened largely because Reddit has long been a strong source of high-quality, practical, user-generated content (UGC).

The UGC Surge in Coupon Search Results in 2025

Our analysis of 350 high-volume brand coupon keywords (each averaging 27,000+ monthly mobile searches, based on Semrush) confirms this shift.

In 2025, Reddit's page-one visibility on Google increased by 112%, reaching an all-time high.
Across those same searches, social media results, including Facebook and Instagram, appeared in 75% of queries, up 40% year-over-year.

Coupon Quality: Reddit vs. CouponBirds

This study evaluates coupon quality using efficiency and accuracy as key indicators. We compare two sources: Reddit, a community-driven forum, and CouponBirds, a dedicated coupon site that uses structured data and systematic validation.

We analyzed 98 high-volume coupon queries—all major Google coupon keywords where Reddit holds top rankings. We measured Reddit and CouponBirds against three core metrics: Brand Coverage, the number of brands with verified codes, and the Verification Rate.

Reddit and CouponBirds Coupon Quality Comparison

The analysis shows that:

For the 59 query brands covered by both Reddit and CouponBirds:
- Reddit provides valid coupon codes for 25% (15 brands).
- CouponBirds provides valid coupon codes for 54% (32 brands).
- There are 10 brands where both platforms list the same valid codes.
For the 39 query brands covered only by Reddit:
- Reddit provides valid coupon codes for only 13% (5 brands).

Key Findings:

CouponBirds' coupon verification rate is more than double that of Reddit for overlapping brands.
Reddit's verification rate remains low, especially for brands not covered by CouponBirds.
This surge in Reddit's visibility may reflect Google's preference for authentic content sources, rather than an actual improvement in coupon reliability.

Reddit Coupons: Freshness vs. Spam

Aged Social Threads in Coupon SERPs

An analysis of the "Pizza Hut coupon code" search query revealed a significant problem: three of the top nine Google results were social discussion threads. None of these threads, all over a year old, contained a working coupon code. Since coupon codes have a short lifespan, the chance of finding a valid discount in these outdated discussions is extremely low.

A New "Trust-Hijacking" Spam

Social platforms like Reddit and Facebook are increasingly outranking smaller coupon websites. Spammers have exploited this shift through Parasite SEO, hijacking posts to siphon off search traffic.

This deceptive activity is widespread: bot-generated spam on Reddit, misleading 'community' groups on Facebook, and fraudulent posts across platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

Why Reddit?

In our research, one signal stands out: the growing number of coupon searches that explicitly include the word "Reddit," like "DoorDash promo code reddit." We call this pattern the Desperation Index:

The higher the volume of coupon searches that include "Reddit," the more dissatisfied and desperate users are with Google's initial coupon search results.

A typical user journey illustrates the problem:

A user searches Google for a coupon, such as "DoorDash promo code," and often fails to find a valid one. This happens for one of two reasons: either the merchant has no current coupon offers, or Google's search results fail to surface them.
The user then searches for "DoorDash promo code Reddit," leveraging their trust in both the search engine and the community platform.
This repeated behavior may lead Google to see the "Reddit" search as a preferred method, causing it to further elevate Reddit's ranking and amplify Reddit's visibility in coupon search results.
The increased ranking of Reddit coupon pages on the first search results page may worsen the user experience.

While seeking community insights on Reddit makes sense in many categories, like product reviews, coupon searches work differently. When a user searches for a specific coupon code, like "target coupon code," rewarding a platform like Reddit can lead to poor outcomes due to its consistently low verification rate. This compounds the ongoing tension between code freshness and the proliferation of spam in UGC.

Google may explain that users value Reddit content, and in many cases, that's true. However, when users add "Reddit" to their queries, it can also signal dissatisfaction with the initial search results. Google should help users find valid savings efficiently, not surface low-value links simply because they contain "human voices."

The Rise of WorthEPenny

Outside Reddit, WorthEPenny was another major winner in coupon search in 2025. According to Semrush, its organic traffic jumped 310% from Dec 2023 to Dec 2025. Unlike Reddit's UGC rise, WorthEPenny achieved this without any real brand recognition.

WorthEPenny and Reddit Organic Traffic Growth

Does WorthEPenny Provide High-Quality Coupons?

To understand why this site ranks so well, we reviewed the quality of its top‑ranked codes. We randomly checked 105 brand‑related coupon searches and compared WorthEPenny's #1 code with the top code on CouponBirds for the same retailers.

WorthEPenny has only 10 brands where its valid code offers a higher discount than CouponBirds, while CouponBirds has 39 brands with better discounts.
29 brands (27.6%) had no valid codes on either platform.
894 out of 1,154 codes (77.5%) on WorthEPenny are labeled "Verified."

Even though that site uses 'Verified' tags everywhere, we found it only actually helps you save money for about 35% of the brands we checked. For that same group of stores, CouponBirds delivers real savings about 63% of the time. It looks like WorthEPenny's fast growth is more about how they play the search engine game than about actually keeping shoppers happy with good coupons.

WorthEPenny and CouponBirds Coupon Quality Comparison

What is WorthEPenny Good at?

AI‑generated Profiles

On the surface, WorthEPenny looks like a model example, displaying a polished "Expert Savings Team" and profiles that mimic a legitimate editorial staff. But the illusion falls apart quickly. According to Hive Moderation, the majority of the listed experts are likely to feature AI‑generated or deepfake content. For example, "Brian Mitchell," introduced as the Director of Operations, has a profile picture that is 99.9% likely to be AI-generated. A closer review shows that much of the site's editorial team appears synthetic. While AI makes detection harder, the pattern is obvious to any human reviewer.

In Sep 2025, Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Section 4.5.3, Deceptive Purpose, states that a page should receive the Lowest rating if it is "designed to deceive people about its true purpose or who is responsible for the content."

This tactic is not unique. As journalist Rob Waugh has reported in the Press Gazette, AI-generated "experts" are spreading across the web, polluting trusted media and search results. WorthEPenny has simply industrialized this tactic to check the right boxes for the algorithm.

Redundant Pages

We reviewed their pages and found the same "quantity over quality" approach. The site relies on mass-produced, redundant pages to capture more traffic. For example, its DoorDash section has multiple near-duplicate pages:

Most of these pages reuse the same coupons with minor rewrites. They even created a page with "DoorDash promo code reddit" in the URL slug.

In March 2024, Google updated its spam policies to specifically address "Scaled Content Abuse." This policy covers the mass production of pages to capture search traffic, regardless of whether the content is created by AI, humans, or both. Google also targets "doorway pages," which are sites or pages created specifically to rank for highly specific search queries and funnel users to a different part of the site.

Scraping Without Verification

WorthEPenny claims that its codes are "hand-tested," but our analysis points to the opposite. Instead of sourcing and verifying offers, WorthEPenny appears to rely on blind automated scraping of other sites' data and presenting it as its own.

The same pattern shows up in their reviews. We found that WorthEPenny scrapes reviews from platforms like Trustpilot, rewrites them, and repackages them as original content—for example, turning a Trustpilot Macy's product review into a review of the WorthEPenny Macy's Coupon Page.

WorthEPenny and Trustpilot Reviews Comparison

One clear example involves our own site. If you click the coupons listed on WorthEPenny https://mixcloud.worthepenny.com/coupon/, it redirects you to a CouponBirds page https://www.couponbirds.com/codes/mixcloud.com that we stopped using in July 2024 and completely deleted by July 2025. Because WorthEPenny's page ranked so well on Google, users looking for coupons were being sent to a 404 page on our site almost every day throughout 2025.

It's clear that their systems copied our data years ago, labeled it as 'verified,' and never checked it again. This shows that their 'Verified' tags may not be real and highlights how users are being sent to sites that don't actually provide savings.

Google has strict rules against this kind of 'scraped content.' The policies state that sites shouldn't republish information from other sources solely to boost rankings, especially when it adds no new value for users.

Hallucination Index

Google's coupon results often surface sites like WorthEPenny that prioritize ranking and clicks—what I call the "Hallucination Index"—over delivering real savings. WorthEPenny still ranks highly despite low‑quality coupons, weak branding, and limited credibility signals. Google may explain that users love it, but people click mainly because they trust Google, not because the codes actually work.

When sites like this rank well, it creates a poor user experience. It becomes a real barrier for anyone who simply wants to save money and expects Google to help them find working coupons quickly.

WorthEPenny isn't the only example; many similar low‑quality coupon sites appear across Google's coupon search results. This pattern suggests Google's systems may be missing important signals in the coupon category and giving too much weight to the Hallucination Index, even when the content isn't reliable. A closer look at how these sites rise in the rankings could help Google better understand how they're exploiting the current algorithm.

Google is Good, but Not Yet Strong in Coupon Search

I've always been a strong supporter of Google. I spent more years there than at any other company before founding CouponBirds, and that experience taught me a lot about putting users first and respecting partners. This analysis is intended to help Google better understand why coupons are such a uniquely challenging category and how the current search experience can sometimes cause users to spend more time and miss out on savings.

For Google

To improve the coupon‑search experience, one constructive step for Google would be to identify and highlight truly high‑quality content providers—like CouponBirds—rather than constantly adjusting algorithms to manage low‑quality sites. Google has already made amazing progress with Gemini 3, and addressing both the Desperation Index and the Hallucination Index in the coupon category could lead to even more meaningful improvements for users.
To better evaluate the issues outlined in this article, an A/B test could be informative: replace high‑quality coupon aggregator pages (like CouponBirds) with low‑quality coupon sites or Reddit threads in search results. If the user's 'Desperation Index'—the need to continue searching for a working code—drops, it would indicate that the problem lies within the current search results. We believe high‑quality Professionally Generated Content (PGC) is far more reliable than UGC, especially in categories like coupons.

For Coupon Users

Start with CouponBirds; if you don't find a working code, try other sources afterward. If you enjoy using CouponBirds, please consider sharing it with your family and friends. If you're not satisfied, you are welcome to email me directly at [email protected].
We believe the most efficient way to save with coupons is by using a trusted coupon browser extension. We have redesigned our extension with a strong focus on user privacy and respect for our partners, ensuring a reliable and transparent experience for both shoppers and brands.

No single platform can consistently deliver the best coupons for every brand. For more than a decade, CouponBirds has focused on improving users' chances of finding savings. In 2025, CouponBirds consistently delivered high-quality coupons among all major coupon data providers in Google search. We remain committed to helping more users save both time and money.

Thank you for your time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.