Reddit told investors Thursday it sees AI-powered search as its next major revenue driver, though the feature currently generates no income. The company's Reddit Answers product grew from 1 million to 15 million weekly active users in 2025, while traditional search hit 80 million weekly users.
CEO Steve Huffman positioned Reddit's content advantage around "questions that have no answers" where multiple perspectives matter. The bet: generative AI can surface community discussions better than link-based results. Whether that's defensible against Google and Perplexity remains untested.
The technical shift is significant. Reddit plans to eliminate logged-in versus logged-out experiences by Q3 2026, using AI to personalize all visits. It's also piloting media-rich responses and what it calls "dynamic agents" across five new languages.
Context matters here: Reddit's 2025 OpenAI partnership already feeds platform data into ChatGPT training and responses. Similar deals with Google (AI Overviews) and Anthropic (Claude) position Reddit as infrastructure for LLM development, not just a search destination.
For enterprise leaders, three things to watch. First, Reddit's content model relies entirely on user posts, creating authenticity risks if businesses game visibility through coordinated posting. Second, the company's API pricing decisions in 2023 killed most third-party tools; any search monetization will need to balance developer access against control. Third, the logged-out personalization push suggests Reddit wants to compete with Google for cold-start queries, not just serve its existing community.
Huffman's claim that Reddit offers "the best" multi-perspective answers is testable. So is whether 15 million weekly users represents genuine search behavior or feature experimentation. History suggests the difference matters when monetization starts.