DIGITAL ECONOMY · ANALYSIS
Reddit attributes part of its decline in Google traffic to AI answers
Reddit reports a decline in visits from search and points to changes at Google. Steve Huffman criticizes AI Mode and AI Overviews, while the platform seeks to encourage direct use. The causal link remains management's assessment.
Legal disclosure: this content was produced by an artificial intelligence system. Editorial transparency
Reddit says its search traffic fell in October by an average of more than 1 million incoming visits per week. According to The Verge, Steve Huffman attributed some of the difficulties with Google to AI Mode and AI Overviews during the quarterly earnings presentation.
The executive believes these interfaces change how users navigate the web: AI answers, in particular, reduce websites' visibility on the results page. He also suggests that automatically translated Reddit content is ranking less well, which would mainly affect markets outside the United States. These explanations come from Reddit; the article provides no measurement isolating the effect of each change.
Huffman also maintains that user demand for Reddit remains strong and that Google continues to crawl its pages intensively. The contrast between the search engine accessing content and the visits it actually sends is at the heart of the economic problem described here.
To develop direct and regular visits, Reddit has introduced an interest-based For You feed. The platform has also announced plans to require users to log in to an account. These measures could strengthen its direct relationship with users, but the reported information does not yet allow their effect on dependence on search traffic to be measured.