Reddit announced on Thursday that it will soon start being a (mostly) logged-in-only experience, citing declining search traffic as one of the reasons. Redditors, who are famously level-headed and open to change, reacted about how you would expect.
In an earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman said that Google’s AI Overviews “are not traffic drivers”,” and that “Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet.”
It wasn’t so long ago — June 2024 — that I wrote an article with the headline “Reddit’s traffic is way, way up. Like, banoodles up.”
Things have changed a lot in those two short years!
Here’s what happened back in 2024. Reddit was going public, and just made a deal with Google to license gazillions of posts for Google’s AI training. Reddit’s search traffic was also way, way up.
It saw a 39% increase in traffic from May 2023 to May 2024, according to web analytics firm Similarweb. This was a time period where other social companies saw much slower growth (and Facebook even slightly declined). Much of that was because of Google search traffic.
But that was 2024. People were only tentatively trying out these newfangled AI services like ChatGPT as a potential search replacement. Google had just launched its AI Overviews in search results in May 2024, and they didn’t seem very useful — it told people to put glue in their pizza, after all.
Fast forward to 2026, and people are much more comfortable using AI services like ChatGPT instead of Googling. You can ask Muse to shop for the best air conditioner for you and even make the purchase. Google AI overviews have gotten way, way better, making it so you rarely have to actually click on a website to get your answer. Thanks to all this, search traffic has tanked across the entire internet. Plenty of publishers talk about “Google Zero,” bracing for Google referral traffic to fully bottom out.
Reddit, even with the deal it cut with Google, is experiencing the truth that search traffic is easy come, easy go.
Huffman said in a letter to shareholders said that search traffic was “down meaningfully in Q3,” and that in October it dropped by over 1 million referrals per week on average, and if the trend continued, it could see “a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million” daily active unique visits.
It’s not all bad news, though. Reddit reported $895 million, which was an increase of 53% year-over-year. Its focus is on the logged-in user experience, which is more lucrative for advertising, since users can be more targeted. In the earnings call, Huffman noted that 80% of Reddit’s monetization happens with app users and logged-in users.
There’s something sad about Reddit becoming a semi-closed system; the end of an era of the open web — something that Reddit helped pioneer (and its co-founder Aaron Swartz was passionate about).
On Reddit, Huffman posted a message addressing the change to users: “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.”
