Reddit says Google's AI answers cost it over a million visits a week

Reddit has never made so much money. On October 29, the community site reported quarterly revenue of $895 million, up 53% year over year, and net income of $283 million. Yet CEO Steve Huffman spent part of the earnings presentation talking about a problem: Google is sending it fewer and fewer visitors.

According to Reddit's earnings document, visits reaching the site from search engines fell by more than one million per week on average in October. Steve Huffman blames Google's AI-generated answers: the AI Overviews summaries shown at the top of results and the conversational AI Mode. "The reality is that AI Mode doesn't drive traffic," he said, according to 24/7 Wall St.

First drop in U.S. visitors

The effect already shows in the traffic figures. According to Reddit's official release, daily unique visitors reached 130.3 million, up 12% year over year. But according to the same release, growth now comes only from abroad: daily visitors outside the United States rose 24%, to 79.6 million, while U.S. visitors fell 2%, to 50.7 million. It is the first U.S. decline since the company's 2024 IPO, 24/7 Wall St. notes.

Reddit warned that if the trend continues, total daily audience could fall in the fourth quarter by a double-digit percentage, at the low end of the range, from 130 million, according to the earnings document. It also noted that Google continues to crawl Reddit heavily to draw on its content: demand for data is not slowing, only the visitors are no longer following.

A logged-in-only site, first outside the United States

Reddit plans to respond by gradually closing the door to anonymous visitors. In the fourth quarter, the company will test a version of the site reserved for logged-in members in some countries outside the United States. "It's a test, but we are going to make this transition," its CEO said, according to 24/7 Wall St. The countries involved have not been specified: European readers could be among them.

Asked whether the measure would help against content scraping by bots, Steve Huffman answered, "Without a doubt." Reddit already sells access to its data to Google and OpenAI, and is suing several companies, including Anthropic and Perplexity, which it accuses of scraping its content. A mandatory login would make that data harder to take without paying.

What this says about the web in the age of AI

Reddit's case illustrates a tension many publishers are facing: their content feeds the answers of AI-boosted search engines, but users no longer need to click to read the source. Reddit is powerful enough to react by closing its site. A news outlet or specialized blog cannot afford that. For companies that depend on search ranking, the figure Reddit cites is a signal to watch in their own traffic statistics.

One big unknown remains: Reddit has published no figures on the share of anonymous visitors who will agree to create an account. The first results of the test, expected in the coming months, will show whether the countermeasure works.