Reddit CEO Says Google AI Mode Sends No Traffic, Plans Login Wall

Reddit plans to put a login requirement in front of its content, ending the habit of adding "reddit" to a Google search and landing straight on a thread. CEO Steve Huffman announced the shift after the company's third-quarter results showed search traffic sliding.

"AI Mode doesn't generate traffic, not for us or for anyone, as far as I know," Huffman told investors. He added that Google still crawls Reddit as intensively as before, so demand from Google's side hasn't changed, but the search engine no longer sends users to the platform as it once did. In a statement posted on Reddit, he said that, given a life shaped by the internet, the move is a big change, but the right one for the platform and the business.

The numbers behind the decision

In its shareholder letter, Reddit said search referrals in October fell by more than a million per week on average. If the trend continues, daily active users could drop by a double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter. US daily active users slipped from 53.2 million in the second quarter to 50.7 million in the third, down 2% year on year and the first decline since the IPO. Shares fell 18% after the close.

Pew Research Center data points the same way: users click the source in 8% of visits when a Google AI summary appears, versus 15% with traditional search.

A gate instead of a paywall

The pattern mirrors what publishers have faced. Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, sued Google over AI summaries, while Google says it sends "billions of clicks" to websites daily. Reddit's case has a twist: Google pays about $60 million a year to train its AI models on Reddit threads.

Instead of a paywall, Reddit is opting for free registration. Logged-in users and app users already account for more than 80% of monetization, yet 76.8 million of the quarter's 130.3 million daily users were not signed in. Huffman argued that signed-in users spend more time on the site, which helps Reddit learn their interests and target ads better.

Tests of the sign-in model begin this quarter in markets outside the US. Huffman said practically every large ad-based platform has gone through this transition, and that his five-year goal is for Reddit to become "more Reddit."