Reddit CEO: Google's AI Mode 'does not drive traffic' as weekly search referrals drop over 1M
kimmonismus · x · 2026-10-31
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on the Q3 2026 earnings call that Google's AI-powered search modes no longer send traffic: "AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody."
Key facts:
- Reddit's search traffic dropped by more than 1 million referrals per week on average in October, which Huffman attributes to AI Mode and AI Overviews pushing everyone down the search page
- Reddit is moving users to logged-in access, partly to keep scrapers out of its 27-billion-post corpus
- Huffman says Google still crawls Reddit as hard as ever — it just stopped sending people; Reddit remains a "top search term" on Google
- He also claims machine-translated Reddit content may be ranked lower, primarily hurting international traffic
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