Reddit lost more than one million weekly referrals from search engines, on average, during October. Its CEO, Steve Huffman, pointed to Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode features as the main explanation for the decline and said AI Mode does not send traffic back to Reddit. The company will respond with an access test that requires users to log in in some markets outside the United States.
The decision comes as the social network seeks to reduce its dependence on visits from open searches. At least in the announced test, the change does not mean that all content will be placed behind a registration screen: Reddit still has to decide how much a person can read before being asked to create an account.
“AI Mode does not drive traffic”
— Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit
The decline in visits and its possible causes
In its third-quarter shareholder letter, Reddit described a significant decline in search referrals, which accelerated toward the end of the period and continued in October. The company did not break down the loss by search engine or say how many visits it had received before; therefore, the weekly figure alone cannot be used to calculate Google’s exact share of total traffic.
Huffman offered two possible explanations on the earnings call. The main one, he said, is AI Overviews and AI Mode, which he considers increasingly prevalent in the United States and other markets. In his view, at a minimum, they push other results down the page. The other hypothesis is that Reddit’s automatically translated content is losing rankings, especially outside the United States. The company did not attribute a specific portion of the decline to either factor.
The CEO also maintained that Google is still crawling Reddit just as intensively and that user demand for the platform’s content has not changed. His argument is that the search engine can continue accessing the pages without sending readers to them. In its coverage, Search Engine Journal also reported Huffman saying that, as far as he knows, AI Mode does not direct traffic to other sites either.
The decline coincides with differing signals depending on the region and type of user. Reddit recorded 130.3 million global daily active unique users in the third quarter, the same figure as in the second. In the United States, the number fell from 53.2 million to 50.7 million; the decline was concentrated among users who were logged out, whose numbers dropped from 30.1 million to 27.3 million. Logged-in U.S. users edged up from 23.1 million to 23.4 million.
Reddit’s letter warned that if October’s trend continues, total daily active unique users could fall by a double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter compared with its current base of 130 million. This is a projection contingent on the observed pace continuing, not a result that has already been recorded. Outside the United States, the company reported 24% year-over-year growth in daily unique users; its chief operating officer, Jen Wong, said Reddit increased international marketing spending in part to offset the reach lost from search.
An access gate, not necessarily a total paywall
Reddit will begin testing an experience that requires users to log in in selected markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter. The company has not said which countries will take part. Huffman explained that the test will help determine what a person can view before being prompted to register, including people arriving from a search result or a shared link.
The design of that boundary matters: a thread that appears on Google could still have a readable preview, or require an account before showing much of the conversation. Huffman said some version of Reddit will remain available before a login prompt and that the company wants shared links to keep working. The test results will help define a globally optimized version of the account-based experience.
Reddit presents registration as a way to show more relevant content and gather more signals to target ads. It also argues that registration would protect its data corpus and help it adapt to emerging regulations. On the call, Huffman said most scraping happens through logged-out access. For casual visitors, the trade-off will be clear: they may have to register to read posts they could previously open directly.
The financial incentive to drive this change lies in the difference in value the company assigns to each group. According to the shareholder letter, logged-in users and app users account for more than 80% of Reddit’s monetization. The company also said its third-quarter revenue rose 53% year over year to $895 million. More active accounts could improve ad targeting, but limiting public reading could also reduce the reach of threads that attract new users from search engines.
The cost of depending on Google’s answers
The case highlights a specific tension for Reddit: its communities’ content may still be searchable, but answers generated within Google could reduce the need to visit the original page. This is not the same as a confirmed decline in demand for Reddit. The company itself identifies changes in access and visibility as hypotheses, although it does not have a breakdown that would make it possible to measure how much each cause contributes.
There is also a commercial relationship that adds another layer. Xataka reports that Google pays Reddit about $60 million a year to use its posts to train AI models. Search Engine Journal says Huffman stated that Reddit is in active data-licensing discussions with Google and OpenAI, without announcing a new deal and acknowledging that failing to reach another agreement is also a possibility. Thus, Reddit can earn revenue by licensing content while also worrying about the loss of visits associated with AI-powered search products.
Reddit’s response is not to close off all its content or rely solely on its app. The company is still trying to convert mobile web users arriving from search: its letter indicates that only about 13% of eligible users currently see the prompt to switch to the app. At the same time, the registration test aims to strengthen the direct relationship with users who do return and provide useful signals for advertising.
For companies that publish content and depend on Google, Reddit’s figures do not prove that they are all experiencing the same decline: they relate to one specific platform, and the company did not break down traffic by search engine. They do show why changes in the search experience can have commercial consequences even when content continues to be crawled and sought out. Reddit will test whether more identified users can offset some of the lost reach; the first practical indication will be how much of a thread someone arriving from a search can read without an account.
Sources: Search Engine Journal, The Decoder, Xataka
