Reddit looks to AI search as its next big opportunity

Reddit seeks AI search as its next significant opportunity.

Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, it offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search. It hinted that although search is not yet monetised, “it’s an enormous market and opportunity.”

In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.”

“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,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the correct link to a topic or subreddit. But LLMs can be good at this, too, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”

The executive also noted that weekly active search users over the past year increased by 30%, from 60 million to 80 million. Meanwhile, the weekly active users for the AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 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 added.

Reddit said it’s working to modernise the AI answers interface by making its responses more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.

The company is also considering how to position itself as not just a social site but a place people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it’s doing away with the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in Q3 2026, as it will aim to personalise the site — using AI and machine learning — and make it relevant to whoever shows up.

In 2025, the company announced plans to integrate its AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the user experience. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and its AI feature. It also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”

Though Reddit sees value in its AI answers, it’s not been keeping that to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which enables other companies to train their AI models on its data, is also growing. That business revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenues (i.e., its non-ad revenue). This “other” revenue increased by 8% year-over-year to reach $36 million in Q4 and was up 22% to reach $140 million for 2025.