Google's AI costs Reddit visitors: platform wants to put more content behind a login
In October, Reddit lost more than a million search referrals a week. CEO Steve Huffman blames Google's AI answers and is testing a login requirement.
Archive image · Photo: Web Summit / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Online platform Reddit is losing significant numbers of visitors from Google search – and blames the search giant's AI features. Presenting quarterly results on Thursday, management said referrals from search engines fell noticeably in the third quarter and declined further in October, by more than one million a week on average. If that pace continues, daily active users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter. The figure currently stands at around 130 million.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sees the main cause in Google's AI Overviews and the AI Mode in search, which answer questions directly without users clicking through to websites. AI Mode simply does not drive traffic, Huffman said. The platform therefore plans to test a version in selected markets outside the US in the fourth quarter in which content is mostly visible only after logging in. According to Reddit, logged-in and app users account for more than 80 percent of monetisation.
Business is still going well: revenue rose 53 percent to 895 million dollars in the third quarter, with net income of 283 million dollars. For the fourth quarter, Reddit expects revenue of 1.00 to 1.03 billion dollars.