As per title, I do think this could be a pivoting factor on whether Lemmy (and other federated services) can reach critical mass.
Doing a simple search on major search engines would likely yield a Quora or Reddit result or more on the first page.
It’s critical that Lemmy posts have that same kind of traction to attract a large enough user base.
That’s just my observation.
It’s all text, and nothing particular locks content away from crawlers from what I see. There’s no reason that web search engines won’t treat lemmy instances the same as Reddit. I think it will just take a little time while new, relevant content is generated and placed here.