Reddit Bets on AI Search as Its Next Big Opportunity
▼ Summary
– Reddit believes its AI-powered search engine represents a major business opportunity and a future revenue driver, though it is not yet monetized.
– The company argues its generative AI search is particularly strong for queries requiring multiple perspectives, a domain where it claims to be the best on the internet.
– User growth for search is significant, with weekly active users for search reaching 80 million and for the AI-powered “Reddit Answers” feature growing from 1 million to 15 million in 2025.
– Reddit is modernizing its search interface with media-rich responses and plans to personalize the site for all users by removing the logged-in/logged-out distinction in Q3 2026.
– The company’s content licensing business, which allows AI model training on its data, is growing, contributing to an “other” revenue increase of 22% to $140 million for 2025.
Reddit is positioning its AI-powered search capabilities as a major future growth engine, signaling a strategic shift beyond its traditional social platform roots. During a recent earnings discussion, company leadership emphasized that while the search function isn’t currently generating revenue, it represents a massive potential market. The core vision involves merging conventional search with generative AI to create a more comprehensive discovery tool.
The company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries,” particularly for subjective questions that benefit from multiple human perspectives. CEO Steve Huffman argued that Reddit’s unique value lies in its communities, which can provide nuanced answers to questions that lack a single, definitive solution. While traditional search acts as navigation to find specific links or subreddits, large language models (LLMs) can enhance or even surpass this functionality, a direction Reddit is actively pursuing.
User metrics support this focus. Weekly active users for the overall search function grew significantly over the past year. More notably, engagement with the AI-specific feature, Reddit Answers, saw explosive growth from its launch to the end of the last fiscal year. This rapid adoption indicates strong user interest in the AI-driven question-and-answer format.
To build on this momentum, Reddit is modernizing the AI answers interface. The goal is to make responses more dynamic and media-rich, moving beyond plain text. Pilots are already testing these enhanced results, which could include images, videos, or other interactive elements. This evolution is part of a broader strategy to reposition Reddit not merely as a social network, but as a primary destination for finding reliable answers.
A significant operational change supports this ambition. Starting in the third quarter of the coming year, Reddit will eliminate the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users. The platform will use AI and machine learning to personalize the experience for every visitor, aiming to make the site immediately relevant regardless of how someone arrives.
The technical integration of its core search engine with the Reddit Answers AI feature has advanced considerably. The company has also expanded the AI tool’s availability by adding support for five new languages. Alongside these product developments, Reddit is exploring the use of dynamic AI agents to further refine search outcomes.
While developing these tools for its own users, Reddit is also capitalizing on the AI boom through its content licensing business. The company licenses its vast data trove to other firms for training their AI models. This revenue stream, categorized under “other” non-advertising income, showed healthy growth both for the recent quarter and the full fiscal year, highlighting the commercial value of its unique conversational data.
(Source: TechCrunch)
