Reddit knows it has valuable data from real people on its platform – it has already made deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share data with them.
But Reddit is also investing and improving its search capabilities, and in a recent investor note, CEO Steve Huffman said the company is “focusing our resources on areas that will meet our most important needs,” including “making Reddit the primary search engine.”
Huffman says that “every week, hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit looking for advice, and we’re turning more of that intent into active users of Reddit’s native search.”
Reddit’s main search has more than 70 million weekly active unique users – compared to an overall Reddit average of 416.4 million weekly active unique users – and Reddit Answers, the platform’s AI search tool that will launch in December, has 6 million weekly users, up from 1 million weekly users in the first quarter of this year.
“Expanding Reddit Answers globally, integrating it more deeply into the core search experience, and making search a central feature across Reddit,” Huffman says.
On the other hand, Reddit gets a lot of traffic from Google. The company has already lost a lot of traffic to Google’s algorithms, but Google is one of the biggest traffic generators for Reddit. If it loses its advantage, the platform may need to have better search for itself.
Reddit turned 20 last month, and the company is going big on AI.
