Verge: Reddit CEO says Google's AI Mode stopped sending traffic, weekly referrals down 1M+
kimmonismus · x · 2026-10-31
The Verge covers Reddit's Q3 2026 earnings call, where CEO Steve Huffman said Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews are cutting traffic to Reddit: "AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody... Google used to be a traffic driver, now it's not."
- Search referrals fell more than 1 million per week on average in October
- Reddit is pushing logged-in access partly to block scrapers from its 27-billion-post corpus, though Google still crawls it heavily
- Machine-translated Reddit content may be ranked lower, hurting international traffic
- Reddit remains a top Google search term, which Huffman says says nothing about consumer demand disappearing
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