Reddit loses more than a million weekly visits from search engines and responds with mandatory login

To read Reddit you will have to have an account. The platform will begin to require the required login in the United States and, in parallel, will test a version lite which can be consulted without registering. Its CEO, Steve Huffman, announced it in the round of questions after the presentation of results for the third quarter of 2026. His justification? A fear that has hovered over the company for a long time, namely that habits when searching for information on the Internet have changed radically.

“Web search is moving from being a gateway to the web to becoming a destination in itself, powered by AI,” Huffman said. According to him, that type of search “solves a different problem than Reddit,” because “it doesn’t satisfy people’s fundamental need for community, connection, and a sense of belonging.” Hence the priority set by the company: “Users who are logged in and those of the app are the most valuable, and are our main focus.”

More than a million fewer visits every week

During October, traffic to Reddit from search engines has fallen by more than a million views weekly on average. “If this rate of decline continues, current trends indicate that total DAUq could decline in the fourth quarter by a double-digit percentage, on the low side, compared to our current base of 130 million,” the company acknowledged. In case you were wondering, DAUq is the metric by which Reddit measures its daily active unique users.

The hardest blow is received by non-sessed visitors and web traffic, although it also affects registered users and the app, because search engines are one of the ways in which those who already know the platform return. Still, Huffman insists that “search traffic trends do not determine our relevance or define our future.”

What is the fall attributed to? The company has two hypotheses and the main one is AI Overviews and AI Mode. “What started as a feature is now the entire search experience, and at the very least, it pushes everyone down the page,” Huffman explained, adding that “those experiences don’t drive traffic” and that “Google has really changed its relationship with the rest of the Internet.” The second has to do with Reddit’s automatic translations, which Google would be ranking worse, especially outside the United States.

The agreement that Reddit signed with Google in 2024

Despite the darts fired at Google from Reddit, it must be remembered that the relationship between both companies has gone through other phases. Reddit even threatened to stop Google from crawling its website because it feared its data would be used for free to train AI models.

However, in February 2024 it signed an alliance with Google that gave it real-time access to its data API to offer it “more efficient ways to train models.” The agreement, valued at about 60 million dollars a yearalso included Reddit’s access to Vertex AI, Google’s service to improve searches. A year earlier, Huffman himself had declared to that medium that “the data license is a potential new business” for the company.

Now Reddit is complaining about the responses generated with AI from the same search engine to which two years ago it opened its data to train models without any benefit to those who actually create the content, which are the users. If mandatory login leaves the United States, millions of conversations will no longer be accessible to anyone with a browser, and the open web will lose another of its players.