Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a results conference call today that Google’s AI-powered search modes don’t help with traffic to the platform, echoing problems faced by other websites and publishers. As part of its Q3 2026 earnings, Reddit revealed that search traffic in October “has declined by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” and attributes part of the company’s struggles with Google traffic to how AI mode and AI overviews change the search experience.
“The reality is that AI mode doesn’t generate traffic,” says Huffman. “Not for us, or for anyone, as far as I know. That’s just a fundamental change in the way Google works. It used to be a traffic driver, now it’s not.”
He says the AI overviews and AI mode have “evolved a lot” and now, at a “minimum,” push “everyone down the search page.” Huffman also says Reddit believes its content automatically translated into other languages is ranking lower in search results, which he says would primarily affect the company outside the US.
However, Reddit remains a “top search term on Google,” Huffman says. “This says nothing about Internet consumer demand for Reddit. People still want Reddit. It says Google doesn’t send them to Reddit like it used to.” He also says that Google “is dragging us down as hard as ever, so demand hasn’t changed from their point of view either.”
(Google’s business has also been affected by AI Mode: yesterday it said it is seeing “less monetization” on AI Mode ads, although it is now bringing AI ads to more countries.)
To try to combat search referral difficulties, Reddit is working to make the platform a “direct, sticky, daily destination.” Yesterday it introduced a “For You” feed with recommendations related to your interests, and in August it began testing an experiment that uses artificial intelligence to convert posts into short videos.
Reddit also announced today that it will force everyone to log in, which Huffman said will be “better for the user experience, better for our advertising business, be more in line with security standards, and be more protective of Reddit’s data.”
