Reddit is preparing for what could be the most important shift in its business since it went mainstream: turning search, powered by artificial intelligence, into its next major growth engine.
During its fourth-quarter earnings call, the company made it clear that AI-driven search is no longer just an experiment or a feature upgrade. It is being positioned as a core product opportunity and eventually, a serious revenue line even though it is not yet monetized.
At the center of this push is Reddit Answers, the platform’s AI-powered conversational search tool. In less than a year, it has gone from a niche experiment to one of Reddit’s fastest-growing products. Weekly active users jumped from about 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the end of the year. At the same time, Reddit’s traditional search function grew to 80 million weekly users, up 30% year over year.
For Reddit, those numbers are not just a sign of engagement. They are proof of changing behaviour. More people are coming to Reddit not just to scroll or comment, but to ask questions and increasingly, to expect direct answers.
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“There’s a type of query we’re particularly good at I’d argue, the best on the internet,” CEO Steve Huffman told investors. “Questions that have no single answer, where the value comes from multiple perspectives from lots of people.”
That idea sits at the heart of Reddit’s AI search strategy. Traditional search engines are designed to point users to links. Reddit believes generative AI can do something different: pull together context, opinions, and lived experience from millions of real conversations, then present them in a single, usable response.
In other words, Reddit wants to be where people go when Google-style answers fall short.
The company is now working to merge its classic keyword-based search with Reddit Answers into one unified experience. Huffman described the direction as moving beyond navigation — finding a subreddit or a post — toward something closer to an answer engine. Large language models, he argued, can already handle basic navigation well. Where Reddit can stand out is in surfacing nuanced, human responses at scale.
That product vision is already shaping development priorities. Reddit said it has made “significant progress” unifying its search systems and is actively modernizing the AI interface. Future answers will be more media-rich, moving beyond text to include images and other formats. The company is also piloting “dynamic agents,” AI systems that can adapt responses based on context and intent rather than delivering static summaries.
Language expansion is another signal of ambition. Reddit Answers added five new languages in the fourth quarter alone, pointing to plans to make AI search a global product rather than one limited to English-speaking users.
Perhaps the most telling shift is how Reddit plans to treat users themselves. Starting in the third quarter of 2026, the company will remove the traditional distinction between logged-in and logged-out users. Instead, it aims to use AI and machine learning to personalize the experience for anyone who lands on the site.
The logic is simple: if Reddit wants to be an answer destination, it cannot behave like a closed social network. Casual visitors need relevance immediately, without friction. Personalization, powered by AI, becomes the bridge between search traffic and long-term engagement.
Behind the product story is a quieter but increasingly important revenue line. Reddit’s content licensing business which allows AI companies to train their models on Reddit data is growing steadily. That business, reported under “other” revenue, brought in $36 million in the fourth quarter and $140 million for the full year, up 22% year over year.
This creates an unusual dynamic. Reddit is both building its own AI search product and selling the raw material – human conversation – that powers competing AI systems. It is a hedge against uncertainty. If Reddit Answers becomes a dominant product, the company benefits directly. If others win the AI search race, Reddit still gets paid for supplying the data.
The timing of this pivot is not accidental. Search itself is changing. Google is pushing deeper into AI-generated answers. Startups like Perplexity are challenging the link-based model altogether. At the same time, many users already treat Reddit as an unofficial search layer, appending “reddit” to queries when they want real opinions instead of polished marketing pages.
Reddit is betting that it can formalize that behavior, own the interface, and capture more value in the process.
The challenge, as always, is monetization. Reddit’s community has historically been sensitive to ads and heavy-handed commercialization. Huffman avoided giving timelines, stressing instead the size of the opportunity. Search, he said, is “an enormous market,” but the company is still focused on getting the product right before turning revenue on.
For now, growth is the signal Reddit is watching. With 15 million weekly users already using AI answers and 80 million searching the platform every week, demand is no longer theoretical.
The question is whether Reddit can convert its greatest asset authentic, messy, human conversation into a scalable search business without diluting what made it valuable in the first place. If it succeeds, Reddit may no longer be seen primarily as a social platform, but as one of the internet’s most important places to ask and answer questions.
