Search Strategy And Product Direction
Reddit told investors that its AI-powered search is becoming a core business opportunity, with user growth and product changes positioning search as both a product focus and a future revenue driver, even though the feature is not yet monetized. On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, executives said Reddit is moving to merge its traditional search with AI search and described the market as large, while adding that generative systems can be better for most queries.
Chief executive Steve Huffman said Reddit performs best on questions that do not have a single answer and instead benefit from many perspectives. He said those are queries where the value comes from multiple people contributing rather than from one definitive response. Traditional search, he said, works more like navigation that helps users find the right link, topic, or subreddit, but large language models can also handle that task and, in some cases, do it better. He said that direction explains why the company is combining the two approaches.
User Growth Figures
The company shared usage figures to show the scale of the shift. Weekly active users for Reddit search grew 30% over the past year, rising from 60 million to 80 million. Weekly active users for Reddit Answers, the AI-powered feature, increased from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter. Huffman said the company is seeing strong growth in that product and sees further potential.
Product Changes And Personalization Plans
Reddit said it is working to update the AI answers interface by adding more media to responses, and it noted that pilots of this approach are already underway. The company also said it is rethinking how users interact with the site as it positions itself not only as a social platform but also as a destination for answers. On the earnings call, Reddit told investors it plans to remove the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in the third quarter of 2026. The goal, the company said, is to personalize the site using AI and machine learning so that it stays relevant to each visitor.
In 2025, Reddit said it planned to combine Reddit Answers with its traditional search engine to improve the user experience. In the fourth quarter, the company said it had made significant progress toward unifying its core search with its AI feature. It also said it released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include media beyond text.
Licensing Revenue Growth
Alongside product changes, Reddit pointed to growth in its content licensing business, which allows other companies to train AI models on Reddit data. That business is reported under “other” revenue, separate from advertising. The company said this category increased 8% year over year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and rose 22% for the full year to reach $140 million in 2025.
Featured image credits: Heute.at
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