Reddit is increasingly betting that search, powered by generative AI, could become one of its most important businesses, not just as a product feature but as a meaningful contributor to revenue over time.
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Reddit executives outlined plans to more tightly merge traditional search with its AI-driven answers experience. While search is not currently monetised, the company told investors it sees “an enormous market and opportunity” ahead.
CEO Steve Huffman argued that Reddit is uniquely positioned to benefit from the shift towards generative AI search. Unlike conventional search engines, which are largely optimised to point users towards a single authoritative answer or link, Reddit excels at questions that have no single correct 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 said on the call.
Traditional search, he added, often functions as navigation, helping users find the right webpage or subreddit. Large language models can increasingly handle that role as well, sometimes more effectively, making AI-driven search a natural evolution rather than a bolt-on feature. “So that’s the direction we’re going,” Huffman said.
The early usage numbers appear to support Reddit’s confidence. The company said weekly active users of its search product grew 30% over the past year, rising from 60 million to 80 million. Growth has been even more dramatic for Reddit Answers, its AI-powered search experience, which expanded from 1 million weekly active users in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.
Reddit is now working to improve how those AI answers are presented. The company said it is modernising the interface to make responses more media-rich, with pilots already underway. It is also experimenting with dynamic agents and search results that include formats “beyond text”.
Longer term, Reddit wants to reposition itself not just as a social platform, but as a destination for answers. Executives revealed plans to remove the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in the third quarter of 2026. The goal is to personalise Reddit for anyone who arrives on the site, using AI and machine learning to make content relevant regardless of whether a user has an account.
Progress is already being made on the technical side. Reddit reiterated that it plans to combine Reddit Answers with its core search engine, and said it made “significant progress” towards unifying the two in the fourth quarter. The company also rolled out Reddit Answers in five additional languages during the period.
AI is also boosting Reddit’s non-advertising business. Its content licensing arm, which allows other companies to train AI models on Reddit data, continues to grow. Revenue from this segment, reported under “other” income, rose 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and climbed 22% to $140 million for the full year 2025.
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