Reddit Says Google's AI Mode Is Not Sending It Traffic
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on the company's Q3 2026 earnings call that Google's AI Mode does not drive traffic to Reddit or to other sites. In the same report, Reddit said search traffic in October fell by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. (The Verge)
The comments extend a theme from the previous quarter. On Reddit's Q2 2026 earnings call in July, Huffman said visibility into referral traffic remained low, and the company said search traffic had been volatile toward the end of that quarter. (Motley Fool transcript)
Huffman attributed part of Reddit's Google traffic decline to the way AI Overviews and AI Mode change the search experience. He said the two features push everyone further down the search page, at a minimum. Referrals are visits sent from one site to another, so for a site that relies on users clicking through from results, a layout change that moves regular listings lower reduces its visitors directly, regardless of how well Google's index covers its pages.
Huffman also pointed to a second factor. Reddit believes its machine-translated content, meaning pages translated by software rather than people, is ranked lower in search results, and he said that effect primarily touches the company outside the US. The claim links ranking treatment to localization, a distinction that matters for a platform whose international users depend on translated pages being discoverable in local search.
Other remarks point in a different direction. Huffman said Reddit is still a top search term in Google, and that Google is crawling Reddit as hard as ever. Crawling is the process by which search engine bots read and index web pages. Crawl activity and query demand are still high, in other words. What has changed is how many of those queries end in a click to Reddit. Indexing volume and referral volume are separate metrics, and a site can be heavily crawled while receiving fewer visits from the results page.
On the product side, Reddit announced that it will require users to log in. It also introduced a For You feed with recommendations tied to users' interests. Both changes move the platform toward logged-in, personalized sessions, which search engines cannot fully index or summarize in the same way as public threads.
In my view, the central question here is less about one quarter's traffic figures than about how open-web publishers hold their audiences once the results page answers the query itself. Search referrals have long been a predictable input for many platforms. Huffman's comments on low visibility suggest that forecasting from search has become harder, which is a planning problem as well as a revenue one.
The broader context here is the logged-in requirement and the For You feed, which Reddit presents as its clearest answer to that problem. If they work, Reddit's value would rest more on users who return directly and less on what a search engine chooses to send. That reading is optimistic, and it depends on execution that later quarterly results will have to show.
