Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on the company’s earnings call that Google’s AI-powered search modes do not send traffic to the platform, a problem he said extends to other websites and publishers. The comments came as Reddit reported its Q3 2026 results and disclosed a decline in search referrals. Huffman attributed part of Reddit’s Google traffic struggles to how AI Mode and AI Overviews have changed the search experience.
Reddit said search traffic in October has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. According to Huffman, AI Mode does not drive traffic for Reddit or for anyone else as far as he knows, and he described the shift as a fundamental change in how Google works. Google, he said, used to be a traffic driver and now is not.
Huffman said AI Overviews and AI Mode have evolved considerably and now at a minimum push everyone further down the search page. He also said Reddit believes its content that is machine-translated into other languages is being ranked lower in search results, which he said would primarily affect the company outside the US.
Even so, Huffman said Reddit remains a top search term in Google. He said the situation does not reflect internet consumers’ demand for Reddit, which he said remains strong, but rather that Google is not sending people to Reddit the way it used to. He added that Google is crawling Reddit as hard as ever, indicating demand from Google’s side has not changed either.
Google’s own business has felt the effects of AI Mode. The company said yesterday that it is seeing lower monetization in AI Mode ads, though it is now bringing AI ads to more countries.
To counter the search referral difficulties, Reddit is working to make the platform a direct, sticky, daily destination. Yesterday it introduced a For You feed with recommendations tied to user interests, and in August it began testing an experiment that uses AI to turn posts into short videos. Reddit also announced today that it will force everyone to log in, which Huffman said will be better for user experience and for the company’s ads business, more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit data.
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