News & analysis
Reddit's Working Theory: Google's AI Search Features Are Behind Its Traffic Drop
Reddit told shareholders its search referral traffic fell by more than 1 million visits per week on average in October, and CEO Steve Huffman says AI Overviews and AI Mode are the biggest part of the company's working hypothesis for the decline.
By Roomer Editorial · · 4 min read
What did Reddit report about search traffic?
Reddit disclosed to shareholders this week that search referral traffic slid by more than a million visits weekly, on average, across October. That slide followed a third quarter in which the company's own letter already flagged a significant pullback in search referrals.
Reddit's letter frames the risk in plain terms: if the October rate of decline holds, total daily active uniques could fall in the fourth quarter by a low-double-digit percentage from the current base of 130 million. The letter doesn't say what weekly referral count the decline is measured against, and it doesn't break the drop out by search engine.
Why does Reddit think this is happening?
CEO Steve Huffman laid out a two-part working hypothesis on the earnings call. The bigger factor, he said, is Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, which he said Google is expanding aggressively in the U.S. and elsewhere. At minimum, he said, those features push other results further down the page.
The second factor is machine-translated content, which Reddit believes Google is ranking lower, mostly affecting traffic outside the U.S. Huffman said this doesn't look like a temporary algorithm shift, though he added Reddit has no direct visibility into Google's ranking decisions.
He was blunt about where he thinks the blame sits.
Huffman also said demand for Reddit itself hasn't changed. The word "Reddit" remains among the most-searched terms on Google, he said, and Google is crawling the site as hard as ever. Separately, he said Reddit is in active discussions over data licensing with Google and OpenAI, with no update to share and no deal guaranteed.
What is Reddit's logged-in-only test?
Reddit plans to fully test a logged-in-only version of the site in select markets outside the U.S. starting this quarter. Neither the letter nor the call named the markets.
The test is meant to settle how much of a Reddit thread a visitor can see, including someone who clicked through from a Google search, before hitting a login wall. Huffman said some version of Reddit will remain visible before that hard prompt, and that shared links should keep working. But he was direct about the tradeoff: "we are going to make this transition," and Reddit expects to trade reach for engagement.
Reddit's stated reasons go beyond search traffic. The letter says logging in helps the company target ads, protects its data corpus from scraping, and helps it adapt to regulatory requirements. Huffman said most scraping currently happens through logged-out access.
How are the underlying numbers moving?
Global daily active uniques held at 130.3 million from the second to third quarter. In the U.S., DAUq fell from 53.2 million to 50.7 million, entirely driven by a drop in logged-out users, from 30.1 million to 27.3 million. U.S. logged-in DAUq moved slightly the other direction, up from 23.1 million to 23.4 million over the same period.
International DAUq climbed 24% compared with the same quarter last year. Reddit increased international marketing spend over the same period, which COO Jen Wong said was meant in part to offset reach lost from declining search referrals.
Logged-in and app users already account for more than 80% of Reddit's monetization, per the letter. Third-quarter revenue grew 53% year over year to $895 million. Only about 13% of eligible mobile web users currently see Reddit's prompt to convert to the app, which the company plans to keep pushing.
Asked whether advertisers are buying Reddit placement to influence AI model outputs, Wong said the company is "pretty skeptical of GEO" and that generative engine optimization isn't part of its advertiser offering today.
Roomer Editorial's take
Reddit's numbers are a rare first-party look at what AI Overviews are doing to a publisher that ranks across a huge range of queries, including the "best neighborhood in Lisbon" and "is X resort worth it" threads travel searchers land on constantly. If a site with Reddit's scale and Google relationship is losing over a million referrals a week, a travel creator's blog post or forum reply sitting one layer deeper in results isn't better insulated.
The login test matters more for travel creators than it looks. Plenty of trip-planning searches resolve to a Reddit thread, and that thread has generally been readable without an account. If Reddit starts gating that content behind a login prompt in test markets, some of the traffic that used to land on Reddit threads has nowhere obvious to go, which is either an opportunity or a dead end depending on who already owns a page that can absorb it.
Roomer Editorial's view: this is another data point for why a creator's business shouldn't depend on being embedded inside someone else's platform, whether that's a forum thread or a social feed. A page you control, that Google can index on its own terms, holds up differently than a conversation happening inside a site that's actively deciding how much of itself to show logged-out visitors. Roomer's model is built around that distinction: a travel site built from a creator's own videos, with close to a million pages already indexed on Google across more than 11,000 creators, is a bet on owning the page rather than renting space on one.
Roomer Editorial's view: if you've been treating a Reddit thread or forum post as part of your distribution, start pulling that content onto a page you control now, before any login wall decides for you how much of it a searcher gets to see. Don't wait for a platform's quarterly letter to tell you your traffic depends on someone else's product decision.
If you post travel content on Reddit, in forums, or anywhere outside your own site, check how much of your current search exposure actually depends on that platform's login and crawl policies staying exactly as they are today.
Source: Search Engine Journal
