Reddit Loses 1 Million Search Referrals a Week, Blames Google AI

Reddit told shareholders Thursday that search traffic dropped by more than 1 million referrals per week on average during October, and CEO Steve Huffman pointed at Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode as the biggest suspected cause.

The disclosure came in Reddit's third-quarter shareholder letter, which said search referral traffic was "down meaningfully" in Q3, with the decline speeding up late in the quarter and continuing into October. Logged-out and web traffic took the biggest hit. Some of that traffic carried over to logged-in and app usage, because search is a common way returning users find Reddit.

"During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," the letter states. "If this rate of decline continues, current trends would suggest that total DAUqs could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million DAUqs."

The letter does not give the baseline weekly referral count, and it does not break the decline out by search engine.

How big is the user impact?

Reddit's global daily active uniques held at 130.3 million from the second quarter to the third. In the U.S., they fell from 53.2 million to 50.7 million.

The U.S. decline came entirely from logged-out users: logged-out DAUq fell from 30.1 million to 27.3 million between Q2 and Q3, while logged-in U.S. DAUq rose slightly, from 23.1 million to 23.4 million.

Outside the U.S., DAUq grew 24% year over year. Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said Reddit raised international marketing spend partly to make up for reach lost from search referrals.

Three months earlier, Reddit's second-quarter letter described search referrals as "choppy," with traffic more volatile late in that quarter.

Why does Huffman point at Google's AI features?

Asked what was driving the Google traffic changes, Huffman said Reddit's working hypothesis has two parts. The biggest is AI Overviews and AI Mode, which he said Google appears to be expanding aggressively in the U.S. and elsewhere. At a minimum, they push other results down the page.

The second factor is machine-translated content, which Huffman said Reddit believes is being ranked lower, mainly outside the U.S. He said this does not look like the kind of algorithm change that comes and goes, though Reddit lacks visibility into that. Neither the letter nor the call says how much of the decline Reddit attributes to each factor.

Huffman said demand for Reddit itself has not changed. The word "Reddit" remains among the most-searched words on Google, he said, and "Google is crawling us as hard as ever." He added that AI Mode "does not drive traffic" — not for Reddit and, as far as he knows, not for anyone else.

A robots.txt change in July 2024 had left Google as the only major search engine able to show Reddit's newest posts. Reddit signed a data licensing deal with Google earlier that year. Asked about data licensing with Google and OpenAI, Huffman said Reddit is in active discussions with no update to share, and that not doing a deal is one possible outcome.

What does the login test change?

Reddit's letter says it will begin fully testing a logged-in-only experience in select markets outside the U.S. this quarter. It did not name the markets.

The letter gives three reasons: logging in will help users find more relevant content, give Reddit more signals for ad targeting, and protect access to its corpus of data while adapting to emerging regulations. On the call, Huffman said the vast majority of scraping happens through logged-out access.

Huffman said Reddit needs to find the right boundary "to provide value to the user, whether they're coming from a shared link or maybe from search themselves or trying out Reddit." Some version of Reddit will remain visible before a hard login prompt, and shared links are meant to keep working.

"This is a test, but we are going to make this transition," Huffman said, adding that Reddit will likely trade reach for engagement.

The economics support that trade. Logged-in and app users account for over 80% of Reddit's monetization, according to the letter, and third-quarter revenue grew 53% year over year to $895 million. Reddit also plans to keep converting search-referred mobile web users to its app; only about 13% of eligible mobile web users currently see the conversion prompt.

Asked whether brands advertise on Reddit to show up in AI models, Wong said Reddit is "pretty skeptical of GEO," or generative engine optimization, and fairly resistant to manipulation. GEO is not part of Reddit's advertiser partnerships today, she said.

What happens next

Reddit's figures offer a first-party read on search clicks for a site whose threads rank across a wide range of Google queries. When the login tests start, the first thing to watch is how much of a thread a visitor from Google can read before the prompt appears. Reddit says the results will inform "an optimized version of logged-in-only Reddit globally."

Reddit will also keep reporting logged-in and logged-out daily uniques by geography, CFO Drew Vollero said Thursday, reversing a plan in its fourth-quarter 2025 letter to phase that reporting out this year.