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Reddit is positioning search as a much bigger part of its future business. During its fourth quarter earnings call, the company pointed to AI powered search as a long term product shift that could also unlock a meaningful new revenue stream, even though monetization has not started yet.
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Reddit told investors that it is making steady progress toward merging its traditional search engine with its generative AI feature, Reddit Answers. Executives described the combined experience as better suited for how users actually look for information, especially when questions do not have a single clear answer.
Chief executive Steve Huffman said Reddit excels at questions that require multiple viewpoints rather than one definitive response:
“There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I would argue, the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people.”
Huffman contrasted that with traditional search, which he described as more navigational, helping users find links or specific subreddits. Large language models, he added, can handle that role as well, if not better. “So that’s the direction we’re going,” he said.
Reddit shared new usage data showing strong momentum. Weekly active users for search grew 30 percent year over year, climbing from 60 million to 80 million. Adoption of AI driven search features accelerated even faster. Reddit Answers expanded from about 1 million weekly users in the first quarter of 2025 to roughly 15 million by the fourth quarter.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential too,” Huffman said.
Product changes are already underway. Reddit said it is modernizing the AI answers interface by adding richer media formats beyond text. Early pilots are live, and the company is also testing dynamic agents that appear alongside search results.
Personalization is another major shift. Reddit told investors it plans to remove the distinction between logged in and logged out users starting in the third quarter of 2026. The goal is to use AI and machine learning to tailor the experience for anyone who lands on the site, positioning Reddit less as a pure social platform and more as a destination for answers.
The company first announced plans in 2025 to unify Reddit Answers with its core search product. During the fourth quarter, Reddit said it made significant progress toward that goal, expanded Reddit Answers into five additional languages, and continued refining how AI and traditional search work together.
While search monetization remains in early stages, Reddit is already generating income from AI related activity through content licensing. That business allows third parties to train AI models using Reddit data and is reported under non advertising revenue.
That segment increased 8 percent year over year to $36 million in the fourth quarter. For the full year, non ad revenue rose 22 percent to $140 million, signaling growing demand for Reddit content beyond its own platform.