Reddit will soon require users to sign in before they can view the site, CEO Steve Huffman said, describing the shift as a move toward a “logged-in-only experience.” The change affects anyone who currently reads Reddit threads without an account, a group that includes people who land on the site through search results. Reddit announced the plan alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today.
There is no firm timeline for when the requirement will reach all users, or for how the site will behave for people who are logged out. Reddit said it will first test the requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to Huffman. The company plans to study the effect on user experience, on its business and on the broader Reddit ecosystem before deciding where the boundaries fall. Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the incognito mode in its app.
Huffman said the login requirement serves Reddit’s user experience and its advertising business and is more protective of Reddit data. He said the “vast majority” of unauthorized access to Reddit happens through logged-out experiences, and that the company will continue striking data licensing deals, such as those it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman said Reddit does not need to know an individual user’s identity, adding that the company does not want to know it, only that the person is logged in. More logged-in users, he said, let Reddit deliver more relevant ads.
Huffman acknowledged the significance of the change for a platform that has allowed logged-out access to nearly all of Reddit for about two decades. He said that as someone whose life has been shaped by the open internet, the shift is a big change for him as well, but that he concluded it is the right call for the platform and the business. The open model has made Reddit a target for scraping and automated traffic, and the company has filed lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access to its data and made product changes such as limiting access to “Old Reddit.”
In the shareholder letter released with the earnings, Huffman said search traffic fell meaningfully in Q3, with logged-out traffic and web traffic hit hardest. During October, he said, search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. He noted that app and logged-in daily active unique users account for over 80% of monetization on Reddit, which he said reflects the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of ongoing product work.
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