Reddit is preparing to make account access the norm after a sharp decline in Google referrals exposed how vulnerable the platform remains to changes in search. CEO Steve Huffman says Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews are no longer reliably sending visitors to Reddit, a shift that could reshape how millions of people discover the site’s communities and discussions. Reddit’s warning about AI-driven search traffic arrived alongside its third-quarter 2026 earnings update.
During the company’s earnings call, Huffman said Reddit’s search traffic fell by more than 1 million referrals per week on average during October. The decline was concentrated among logged-out and web visitors, though Reddit said some of the impact is reaching logged-in users and people accessing the service through its apps. If the trend continues, the company cautioned that daily active uniques could drop by a low-double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter from a base of roughly 130 million.
Huffman pointed specifically to Google’s increasingly prominent AI search products. Instead of sending users to a source page, AI Overviews and AI Mode can summarize answers directly inside Google, while also pushing conventional links farther down the results page. “The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic,” Huffman said during the call, arguing that the problem extends beyond Reddit to websites across the open internet.
The timing makes the warning particularly notable because Reddit’s financial results were strong in several other respects. The company reported third-quarter revenue of $895 million, up 53 percent year over year, and adjusted earnings of $1.40 per share, beating analysts’ expectations. Yet weaker guidance and concern about the search-driven audience sent Reddit shares lower, underscoring the difference between monetizing existing users and continually replacing visitors who arrive through Google.
Reddit’s response is a pivot toward a primarily logged-in experience. Huffman says the company will begin testing an account requirement in select markets outside the United States during the fourth quarter, using the results to refine a broader rollout. Reddit says the strategy could improve personalization, advertising and user retention while also making it harder for bots to scrape the platform’s publicly visible discussions.
That move would mark a major change for a service that has spent roughly two decades functioning as an open web destination, where people could read many communities without registering. It may protect Reddit’s advertising funnel and give the company more control over its audience, but it also risks reducing the casual discovery that made the site valuable in Google results. Reddit is therefore confronting a larger industry question: if AI search answers users without sending them onward, publishers may have to choose between closing their doors, building stronger direct audiences or accepting a smaller role in the search ecosystem.
