Reddit looks to AI search as its next big opportunity
Reddit suggested Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its company — not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue source that impacts the bottom line. During Thursday’s fourth-quarter earnings call, the company provided an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search, hinting that while search isn’t monetized yet, “it’s a huge market and opportunity.”
Notably, the company believes that generative AI searches “will be better for most searches.”
“There’s one type of question that I think we’re particularly good at — I’d say the best on the internet — and those are questions that have no answers, where the answer is actually multiple perspectives from many people,” said Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit.
Traditional search is more like navigation: it’s a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit. But LLMs can be good at this too, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”
The executive also noted that the number of weekly active users for search has grown 30% over the past year, from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the number of weekly active users for AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million in the fourth quarter.
“We see a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential there as well,” Huffman added.
Reddit said it is working on modernizing its AI response interface by making responses more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.
The company is also thinking about how it can position itself as not just a social site, but a place where people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it will do away with the distinction between logged in and logged out users starting in the third quarter of 2026, as it aims to personalize the site – using AI and machine learning – and make it relevant to everyone who visits.
The company announced in 2025 that it planned to combine its AI search tool, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and AI function. It has also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is testing dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”
While Reddit sees value in its AI responses, it isn’t keeping that to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on their data, is also growing. That operating income is reported as part of Reddit’s ‘other’ revenue (i.e., its non-advertising revenue). These “other” revenues rose 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and rose 22% to $140 million in 2025.
