Reddit is announcing a big change: it will start requiring users to log in.
Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and overall the site is a great resource for collaborative information on a wide range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who adds “reddit” to many Google searches to find answers to things written by real humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for automated traffic and scraping, prompting Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access to its data and to make changes to its products, such as limiting access to “Old Reddit.”
There is no definitive timeline for when this change will be rolled out to all users or how the site will work if you are offline. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they’re not logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the login requirement in “select markets outside the US.” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the entire Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt itself and is relaunching the incognito mode of the Reddit app.
Huffman claims that the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its advertising business and “better protects Reddit’s data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized access to Reddit occurs “through our logout experiences,” although the company will still close licensing deals for its data with companies, such as the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit doesn’t need to know the identity of a logged-in user – “Honestly, we don’t want to know” – just that the user is logged in. And he claims that a greater number of connected users allows the company to offer “more relevant ads.”
“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed sessionless access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open Internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”
Reddit makes this announcement alongside its third-quarter 2026 results, which were released today. Search traffic “declined significantly” in the third quarter, Huffman says in the letter to the company’s shareholders, with offline traffic and web traffic being hit the hardest. “During October, we’ve seen search traffic drop by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” says Huffman.
However, Huffman notes that the app and daily active unique users who log in account for “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our continued work with the product.”
