Why Reddit Says Google's New AI Search Is Sending It Fewer Visitors
Reddit's chief executive, Steve Huffman, said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call that Google's AI Mode does not send traffic to Reddit or to other websites. In the same report, Reddit said that visits from search fell by more than 1 million referrals per week on average in October. (The Verge)
These comments follow a theme from the previous quarter. On Reddit's second-quarter 2026 earnings call in July, Huffman said the company still could not see much of its referral traffic. Reddit also said search traffic had been unpredictable toward the end of that quarter. (Motley Fool transcript)
Huffman linked part of the drop in Google traffic to the way AI Overviews and AI Mode change the search page. He said both features push everyone further down the page, at a minimum. For a website that relies on people clicking through from search results, pushing the ordinary links lower means fewer visits. That is true even if Google reads the site just as well as before.
Huffman also named a second factor. Reddit believes its machine-translated pages rank lower in search results. He said this mainly affects the company outside the US.
Some of his remarks point the other way. Huffman said Reddit is still a top search term on Google, and that Google crawls the site as hard as ever. People still search for Reddit topics, and Google still reads the site closely. What has changed is how many of those searches end with a click to Reddit.
Think of it like a shop that stays on every map and gets its stock catalogued, yet sees fewer customers walk through the door. Being read and being visited are separate measures. A site can be heavily crawled and still receive fewer visits from the results page.
On the product side, Reddit said it will require users to log in. It also launched a For You feed, which recommends posts based on each user's interests. Both changes move the platform toward logged-in, personalized sessions. Search engines cannot fully index or summarize those sessions the way they can public threads.
In my view, the central question is less about one quarter's traffic and more about how open-web publishers keep their audiences once the results page answers the question itself. Search has long been a predictable source of visitors for many platforms. Huffman's comments about low visibility suggest that planning around search has become harder, which makes it a problem for budgets as well as for revenue.
A more hopeful reading is possible for the login requirement and the For You feed. If they work, Reddit's value would rest more on people who come back on their own, and less on what a search engine chooses to send. That reading depends on how well the changes are carried out, and later quarterly results will need to show it.
