Reddit aims to thrive by focusing on loyal, engaged users amid declining Google search traffic referrals.
Shares of Reddit plunged approximately 30% during Friday’s session after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search features were reducing referral traffic. The sell-off also reflected concerns over weaker fourth-quarter revenue guidance and a slowdown in user growth.
Speaking on the company’s Q3 earnings call, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the expansion of AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google’s AI-powered Search features that generate direct answers to users’ questions, is reducing the traffic the platform receives from search results.
Huffman said Google’s AI features have increasingly become the search experience itself, pushing traditional results down the page and giving users answers without sending them to the websites where the information originated.
“What started as a feature is now the full search experience, and at the minimum, it pushes everyone down the search page. Then on top of that, the experiences themselves are not traffic drivers. These things combined with the rollout just means Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet,” Huffman said.
The company also suspects that changes to how Google ranks machine-translated content are affecting its traffic outside the US.
Huffman said the changes do not indicate that people are losing interest in Reddit. The platform remains among Google’s most searched terms, and Google continues to crawl its content as frequently as before.
“The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know. That’s just a fundamental shift in how Google works. It used to be a traffic driver, now it’s not,” he added.
To encourage users to spend more time on the platform, Reddit is improving its feeds and recommendation technology. Huffman said the company has increased the volume of signals feeding into its models by an order of magnitude, expanded model capacity and cut the time required to train and deploy them.
The changes are already producing stronger engagement among new and existing users, while Reddit plans another year of work on its feeds and daily-use features, he said.
