Reddit will begin testing logged-in access in selected markets outside the United States during the fourth quarter. The company has not yet determined when it will apply the change worldwide or how it will define which pages are visible to people who are not logged in.
The announcement came alongside the results for the third quarter of 2026. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, explained that the site will move toward an experience primarily for logged-in users, although the company recognizes that access to the homepage without logging in remains important. TechCrunch and The Verge reported on the change.
The decline in visits from search engines
Reddit lost more than one million weekly referrals from search engines in October, according to figures Huffman presented on an investor call. In the third quarter, search traffic had already fallen significantly; visits from the web and those from logged-out users were the most affected, the CEO said in the shareholder letter cited by The Verge.
The shift toward searches with AI-generated answers helps explain the decline: a summary can answer a query without the user visiting the Reddit conversation that previously appeared among the results. On PC Gamer, Huffman described the change in Google’s relationship with the rest of the internet. Reddit wants to depend less on those visits and become a destination people go to directly.
The potential impact is also reflected in daily users. Reddit recorded 130.3 million global daily users in the third quarter, unchanged from the previous quarter. In the United States, the figure fell from 53.2 million in the second quarter to 50.7 million in the third, and was 2% below the same period a year earlier, according to TechCrunch. The company warned that, if the trend continues, its daily users could decline by a low double-digit percentage in the next quarter.
More signals for ads and limits on access
Reddit says that daily active users who use the app and those who are logged in together account for more than 80% of the platform’s monetization. According to Huffman, that share supports the strategy of making the service a daily habit that does not depend on search engines. TechCrunch adds that accounts provide signals about interests and behavior that the company can use to personalize recommendations and ads.
The measure also aims to protect Reddit content from automated data scraping. Huffman said that most unauthorized access occurs through logged-out experiences, according to The Verge. The company will, however, continue negotiating data licenses: it already has AI training agreements with OpenAI and Google, and Huffman said there was no news to announce about those discussions.
The company plans to rebuild and republish its app’s incognito mode. Huffman clarified that logging in does not require users to reveal their identity: Reddit, he said, only needs to know that the person is logged in. It remains to be determined what people browsing without an account will be able to access, including how they will open a link to a shared conversation.
“I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”
— Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder and CEO
The first tests will take place in selected markets outside the United States, but Reddit has not given a date for extending the requirement to all its users. The company will evaluate the effects on the user experience, the business, and the platform ecosystem before deciding on next steps.
Sources: PC Gamer, TechCrunch, The Verge
