Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business \u2014 not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company\u2019s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, it offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search together and hinted that although search is not yet monetized, \u201cit\u2019s an enormous market and opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be \u201cbetter for most queries.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a type of query we\u2019re, I think, particularly good at \u2014 I would argue, the best on the internet \u2014 which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people,\u201d said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.<\/p>\n
Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation \u2014 it\u2019s a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit. But LLMs can be good at this, too, if not better, he said. \u201cSo that\u2019s the direction we\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exec also noted that weekly active users for search over the past year grew 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the weekly active users for the AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there\u2019s a lot of potential too,\u201d Huffman added.<\/p>\n
Reddit said it\u2019s working to modernize the AI answers interface by making its responses more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.<\/p>\n
The company is also thinking about how it can position itself when it\u2019s not just a social site, but a place people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it\u2019s doing away with the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in Q3 2026, as it will aim to personalize the site \u2014 using AI and machine learning \u2014 and make it relevant to whoever shows up.<\/p>\n
The company announced in 2025 it was planning to combine<\/a> its AI search feature, Reddit Answers<\/a>, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made \u201csignificant progress\u201d in unifying its core search and its AI feature. It also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include \u201cmedia beyond text.\u201d<\/p>\n Though Reddit sees value in its AI answers, it\u2019s not been keeping that to itself. The company\u2019s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on its data, is growing, too. That business revenue is reported as part of Reddit\u2019s \u201cother\u201d revenues (i.e., its non-ad revenue). This \u201cother\u201d revenue increased by 8% year-over-year to reach $36 million in Q4 and was up 22% to reach $140 million for 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,7191,7330,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-283072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-reddit","14":"tag-search","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}