Google's AI search products are the main reason fewer people click through to Reddit, Steve Huffman, the company's co-founder and chief executive, told analysts on October 29. Speaking on Reddit's third-quarter 2026 earnings call, shortly after the company warned that its 130 million daily active uniques could fall by a low-double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter, Huffman named AI Overviews and AI Mode as "the biggest" factor behind the decline in search referrals. "The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic," he said. "Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know."

In Short

Google now answers many questions with its own AI-written summaries, so people who once clicked a Google link to read a Reddit thread often get the answer on Google and never visit Reddit. That matters because Google sent Reddit a large share of its casual, logged-out visitors, and Reddit now says its daily audience could shrink in the last three months of 2026 if the trend holds. Reddit's response is to push people to log in and use its app, where it earns more than 80% of its money, even if that means fewer visitors overall.

Google named on the call, not in the letter

Reddit's shareholder letter for the third quarter, released before the call, described the decline in detail: search referral traffic was down "meaningfully," the fall accelerated late in the quarter, and in October search traffic had dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. It did not name a search engine, and it did not attribute the fall to any cause.

The call filled that gap. Josh Beck of Raymond James listed the candidates - Google's core updates, changes to its language models, the shift towards AI Overviews and AI Mode - and asked whether "any particular one or two stood out." Huffman's reply put Google's AI products first.

"On the change from Google, our hypothesis is twofold. The biggest one is the AI Overviews or AI Mode," he said, according to a transcript of the call published by Investing.com on October 30. "Both have evolved a lot, and particularly recently, they appear to be expanding them quite aggressively in the U.S. and outside. What started as a feature is now the full search experience, and at the minimum, it pushes everyone down the search page. Then on top of that, the experiences themselves are not traffic drivers."

He drew a broad conclusion from it. "These things combined with the rollout just means Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet."

AI Mode is Google's conversational search surface, in which a Gemini model breaks a query into many sub-searches and writes a single answer. AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries placed above conventional results. Huffman's point about position is mechanical: a summary at the top of the page moves every organic link, including Reddit threads, further down.

A second factor outside the US

Huffman offered a second explanation. "There is a second factor, which we believe our machine translation content is also being ranked lower. This primarily would affect us outside the U.S."

Reddit uses machine translation to make its threads readable in other languages, and a year ago PPC Land's coverage of its third-quarter 2025 results described the translated content as a driver of top-of-funnel growth. PPC Land reported in August that SEO consultant Glenn Gabe had seen Reddit's AI-translated pages in Germany and Italy trending downward after Google's May 2026 core update and June 2026 spam update. Huffman did not say when Reddit first noticed the change or which markets were affected most.

He was careful about what he could not see. "What this is not likely, but we do not have visibility into this, is the sort of algorithm change where I would say, 'Hey, these things come and go.' This appears to be really the rollout of AI Mode, and maybe a change in the machine translation or how they treat that."

That is a hypothesis, in Huffman's own word, not a measurement. Reddit gave no figure for how much of the referral decline it attributes to AI Mode, how much to AI Overviews and how much to translated pages ranking lower.

"Google is crawling us as hard as ever"

Andrew Boone of Citizens returned to the subject later in the call. He asked what kind of traffic was leaving - whether it was concentrated in informational posts or reflected a broad loss of exposure on Google. Huffman did not answer the informational question directly. He described instead what, in his view, had not changed.

"Let me tell you what didn't change. The word Reddit is still among the most searched words on Google. This says that demand for Reddit hasn't changed from the internet consumer. Also, Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn't changed from their point of view either."

Then came the sentence that framed the rest of the discussion. "The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know. That's just a fundamental shift in how Google works. It used to be a traffic driver, now it's not. Now that changes the equation for sure. But it's not that the users want less, it's just that they're getting it."

The claim is that Google still reads Reddit at full intensity and still serves Reddit's content to people searching for it, but that the reading and the serving now happen inside Google's own answers. Huffman gave no crawl figures and no search volume data to support the first two points.

Earlier, answering Beck, he had cast the change in strategic terms. "Reddit, however, is still a top search term in Google, so this does not say anything about the internet consumers' demand for Reddit. People still want Reddit. It is just Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to. Given our strategy is to make Reddit a direct destination, this is actually in line with our strategy because Google is teaching people that if you want to come to Reddit, you need to come to Reddit."

Google's position

Google has said otherwise about clicks in general. Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, wrote on July 17, 2026 that Google was sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search. In May, Google added five outbound link features to AI Mode and AI Overviews, including inline links beside the relevant text and hover previews on desktop. On Reddit specifically, Google told The Verge in early August that Reddit receives no special preference in its ranking systems or AI search features.

Independent measurements point in Huffman's direction, though none of them is specific to Reddit. Ahrefs data from December 2025 showed that AI Overviews reduced the click-through rate for position-one results by 58% on the keywords where they appeared. A randomized experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon found that AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8%. Chartbeat reported on October 15 that search delivered 12% of pageviews to North American publishers in the third quarter of 2026, down from 21% a year earlier.

From flat search to no traffic driver

The language on Reddit's calls has hardened over twelve months. On the third-quarter 2025 call, a year ago, Huffman described external search as basically flat. By the second-quarter 2026 call on July 30, he was telling analysts that Reddit was building a daily destination rather than chasing drive-by traffic, and that AI Overviews had not yet delivered a comparable benefit for Reddit, or for businesses and publishers more broadly. Reddit shares fell 12.49% after hours that evening, to $155.80.

In July, the complaint was that AI Overviews had not yet helped. In October, Huffman described AI Mode as a product that does not send visitors at all.

Google's rollout has been broad. Google expanded AI Mode to more than 200 countries and territories in October 2025, and said in May 2026 that AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly active users globally. Huffman's description - "What started as a feature is now the full search experience" - is his characterization; he did not cite a specific Google change from the third quarter.

What the decline looks like inside Reddit

Most of the figures behind the warning were in the letter. Huffman repeated them in his prepared remarks. "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. If this rate of decline continues, current trends would suggest that total DAUq could fall in Q4 by a low double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million DAUq."

He also explained why the damage was not confined to visitors who never sign in. "The biggest impact was on logged out and web traffic, but some of the impact flows through to logged in and app traffic, since search referral is a common source of re-engagement for users." Reddit users who have the app, in other words, also find their way back to threads through Google; when those links disappear, some of their visits go with them.

The call added detail on engagement. Answering John Colantuoni of Jefferies, Huffman listed what he called green shoots: new user retention up through the year and sequentially, posts and comments up, and another billion posts and comments added to a corpus of 27 billion. "Time on site has been solid," he said. "Where we're seeing mixed results is total sessions are down because of that decline in search referral traffic."

In the third quarter, logged-out visitors averaged 76.8 million of Reddit's 130.3 million daily active uniques. Logged-in users made up the remaining 53.5 million, or 41.1%, by PPC Land's calculation. That logged-out group is the one most exposed to Google, and the one Reddit now plans to shrink deliberately.

What Reddit did not disclose matters as much. The company gave no total for search referrals, no share of traffic arriving from Google, no split by country beyond the US and international totals in its tables, and no breakdown by type of query or community.

Logged-in Reddit as the answer

Seven of the eleven analysts who asked questions raised Google's traffic, the move to logged-in Reddit or content licensing, by PPC Land's count. The logged-in plan drew the most.

Huffman had set out the logged-in experience in a post titled "About that login screen," published on his personal profile hours before the call, in which he said Reddit would move to a primarily logged-in experience. On the call he said the first full tests would start in the fourth quarter in select markets outside the US, and that "the results of those tests will inform an optimized version of logged-in only Reddit globally."

Benjamin Black of Deutsche Bank asked about the origin of the decision. "The transition to logged-in, the genesis is every other platform has done this. Reddit's different. We've been accessible logged out for a long time," Huffman said. He listed four reasons: personalized recommendations, better information for ad targeting, protection of Reddit's data and easier compliance with "emerging regulations around the world." On data, he was direct. "The vast majority of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out user base."

He acknowledged the cost. "There will be trade-offs here. We'll likely be trading reach for engagement."

Where the walls go up

The tests are meant to settle the design questions. "In our test, what we're looking for is to see which surfaces we put the login walls up on, when we do it. For example, we want people to go to reddit.com and get a taste of Reddit. We want link-sharing or post-sharing on Reddit to continue to work," Huffman said.

Colantuoni asked whether Reddit would keep a lite version for people who do not log in, and whether the change was definite. Huffman answered both. "There'll be some version of Reddit accessible for those moments before we do that hard prompt. This is a test, but we are going to make this transition." He added: "At this point, we're the only platform that doesn't do this."

Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer asked how analysts should model a logged-in Reddit, and whether the change would make the site impossible to scrape. Huffman said the conversion rate was unknown. "Making Reddit logged in only will assuredly grow that base. But what the conversion rate is over time, we just do not know." On web scraping: "Will this make Reddit harder to scrape. For sure." He qualified it in the next sentence: "It is not impossible, but again, all of our peers have done this for a long time for this reason."

Ygal Arounian of Wedbush asked whether the logged-out audience would eventually fall to zero. "Look, I can't tell you. I think we'll always have some amount," Huffman said, naming search referrals, shared links and curious visitors to the front page. Then he gave the clearest signal of where the company expects its user numbers to go. "But I think when we look at the business over the long term or even shorter, we would expect app and logged in and total DAU to probably more or less converge, plus or minus some small percent, because that's just where the core of our product is, and that's where we're going to be driving people."

In third-quarter terms, the gap between total and logged-in daily users was 76.8 million. Huffman did not say over what period he expected the two figures to converge, or whether convergence would come mostly from logged-out visitors signing up or from their departure.

What the logged-out audience is worth

The financial case rests on the value gap between the two groups. Jen Wong, Reddit's chief operating officer, put it in one sentence. "Over 80% of our monetization sits on the shoulders of logged-in in-app users because they have order of magnitude more engagement and frequency than our search referral logged-out users. So that is really our bedrock."

She added that over 60% of the business is "performance-oriented," and that pricing, not volume, drove third-quarter advertising growth: "we grew more by CPMs than by impressions," Wong said. "You have to remember, for lower funnel outcomes, you can have CPMs that are triple digits."

That arithmetic is how Reddit can warn of a fall in daily users while guiding to fourth-quarter revenue of $1.0 billion to $1.03 billion, growth of 38% to 42%, according to Drew Vollero, the chief financial officer.

Buying back the reach

Reddit is spending on user marketing to replace part of what Google no longer sends, and the call gave more detail on how than the letter did.

Outside the US, the company turned to web campaigns aimed at reach. "In the quarter, we increased user marketing spend internationally, in part to compensate for the lost reach from the declines of search referral traffic," Wong said. Vollero described the same move from the finance side. "Internationally, we've spent more dollars on user web marketing to grow reach, driving users to the platform where the brand is less well-known, which helped offset the declines in international search referral traffic."

The comments matter for reading Reddit's international audience figures. Daily active uniques outside the US grew in the third quarter while the US figure fell, and international search referrals were also declining. Part of the international growth, by the executives' own account, was bought.

In the US, Reddit moved the other way. "To date, domestic web user marketing spend has proven effective at bringing users to Reddit, but low retention rates have hurt ROI," Vollero said. Dollars shifted to app install campaigns and to the brand campaign "People Are the Best." Total consumer marketing spend stayed at mid-single digits as a percentage of revenue, consistent with the second quarter, according to Vollero.

The early app results are encouraging, by Reddit's account. "It's early, but in our experience so far, our U.S. app install campaigns can retain new users at rates comparable to organic app users," Wong said. Reddit is also "exploring ways to reengage logged-in and app users to sustain core usage and offset pressure from search referral traffic," she said - in effect, buying back some of the re-engagement that search links used to provide for free.

Other levers are product changes. Only about 13% of eligible mobile web users currently see the prompt to switch to the app, Huffman said, "so this has room to scale." He told Vasily Karasyov of Cannonball Research that search-referred visitors remain a large pool despite the decline. "While the search referrals are in decline, there's still a lot of them." An improved incognito mode in the app is meant to reduce reinstalls by people who download Reddit for one piece of content and remove it afterwards.

Google's side of the ledger

Arounian tied the question back to Google's own results, noting that "one of the things we saw yesterday is pressure on Google's ad revenue driven by this," a reference to Alphabet's third-quarter report on October 28. He asked whether Google, which also earns money when people leave its pages through ads, might eventually swing back towards sending traffic to the web.

Alphabet's figures show slower growth rather than a decline. Google Search and other revenue rose 12% to $63.35 billion in the third quarter, down from 17% growth in the second quarter, and only $79 million above the second-quarter figure. Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, listed fast growth in AI Mode queries among the reasons advertising growth slowed, alongside foreign exchange and pullbacks by Asia-Pacific advertisers. Google also said that ads in AI Mode would reach 10 more markets.

Huffman declined to forecast a reversal. "For AI Overviews and traffic, look, we don't control Google. We only control Reddit. They've made so many changes, and I expect there's more to come. Like I said, AI Overviews or AI Mode, it's just not a traffic driver. So we're not counting on that. We make no assumption about where that goes or doesn't go in the future."

So within two days, both sides of the relationship pointed to AI Mode as a drag. Google cited it in explaining slower advertising growth. Reddit cited it in explaining fewer visitors.

Licensing talks with Google and OpenAI

Naved Khan of B. Riley Securities asked how the logged-in plan affects licensing. "You already have existing relationships with OpenAI and with Google for Gemini," he said.

Reddit's agreement with Google, announced in February 2024, was reported at $60 million a year. Its partnership with OpenAI, announced in May 2024, covered data licensing through Reddit's API, AI-powered features and advertising. Reddit did not say on the call when either agreement expires.

Huffman gave no update but said talks continue. "We don't have any updates to share, though we're in active discussions. What's most important is that any deal we do needs to advance our long-term strategy and has to be a fair exchange of value." He described a range of possible terms. "These deals aren't binary, however. There's a bunch of options. On one end, there's access for training, but then there's also display and use in products. On the other end, there's more specific uses of our content." And he left room for no agreement at all: "Which does potentially include not doing a deal, but those conversations continue to progress."

That distinction connects to Huffman's traffic argument. If Google crawls Reddit "as hard as ever" and shows its content in answers that send few users onward, display in AI products is where much of the content's use now happens. Huffman did not draw that connection on the call.

The logged-in move also fits a series of steps to control access. Reddit sued SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity in October 2025, alleging that they scraped Reddit content from Google search results pages. SerpApi filed antitrust counterclaims in August 2026 over Reddit's Google arrangement. And on September 30, Reddit said public access to its Data API would close in March 2027. "Reddit, with its extremely valuable corpus, this change is really important to protect access to that data and make it intentional," Huffman told Helfstein.

Reddit is not selling GEO

Boone's second question went to advertisers. With brand renewals for 2027 approaching, he asked whether advertisers were coming to Reddit to influence the data AI models are trained on.

Wong rejected the idea as a reason to buy Reddit ads. "I think there has been this idea of GEO or kind of organic, et cetera, and I will just say, and we have been very open about this with our partners, we are pretty skeptical of GEO. Reddit itself is pretty inoculated to manipulation, I would say."

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the practice of shaping content so that AI systems cite or recommend it. Boone's question reflected an idea that has circulated among marketers: that a presence in Reddit conversations can shape what AI assistants say about a brand. Wong said it is "not in our partnerships today" and "not a core piece of what we do with our advertising partners today," while acknowledging the interest. "I understand from their point of view, it is something broadly that they are thinking about because they are also dealing with changes in the broader search landscape."

Earlier, Wong had made a related claim in her prepared remarks: "half of U.S. shoppers say they come to Reddit to verify AI recommendations." She did not give the source, sample or date of the survey on the call.

Market reaction

Reddit shares closed the regular session on October 29 at $129.60, down 3.79% from $134.70, and fell to $106.50 in after-hours trading following the release, a decline of 17.82%, according to Investing.com. The after-hours price was below the stock's 52-week low of $119.27. Investing.com attributed the move to the fourth-quarter guidance and to the possibility that Google's AI search changes could weigh on traffic and monetization.

The regular-session close was already 27.2% below the $178.07 close on July 30, the day of the second-quarter results, by PPC Land's calculation. Reddit bought back about $100 million of its stock in the third quarter at an average price slightly below $150 a share, Vollero said.

Huffman framed the moment in historical terms when Tom Champion of Piper asked whether the period reminded him of anything. "This is a consequential time for Reddit, and this period does remind me of about 11 years ago when I came back to the company," he said.

Why this matters for marketers

The call matters to three groups in different ways.

For search marketers and brands that have relied on Reddit threads ranking in Google, the chief executive of one of the largest sources in Google's results says the clicks have gone even though the content is still read and used. That is zero-click search described by a platform with 130 million daily users, not by a small publisher. It also suggests that visibility for a brand in Reddit threads may increasingly be seen through Google's AI answers rather than on Reddit itself - although Reddit published no data on that distinction.

For advertisers buying Reddit inventory, the audience is being reshaped on purpose. Fewer logged-out web visitors means fewer of the impressions Wong described as least valuable; more logged-in users means more of the signals Reddit says it needs for targeting. The fourth-quarter guidance of 38% to 42% growth assumes pricing and engagement can absorb the loss of reach. Huffman put the trade-off plainly: "trading reach for engagement."

For publishers watching their own Google referrals, Reddit's account adds a large, data-rich platform to the list of sites reporting the same pattern, and its response - logins, app conversion, paid acquisition and tighter control of licensing - requires spending. Reddit's consumer marketing alone runs at mid-single digits as a percentage of revenue, funded from an adjusted EBITDA margin of 45% in the third quarter.

What the call does not establish is also clear. Reddit offered a hypothesis about causes, not a measurement. It did not separate the effects of AI Mode, AI Overviews and lower-ranked translated pages, and it did not publish referral totals. Its statements that Reddit remains among the most searched terms on Google and that Google crawls the site "as hard as ever" came without supporting figures. Google was not on the call to respond.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Reddit, Inc. and its executives Steve Huffman (co-founder and chief executive), Jen Wong (chief operating officer) and Drew Vollero (chief financial officer), questioned by analysts from Deutsche Bank, Raymond James, Jefferies, B. Riley Securities, Piper, Citi, Citizens, Cannonball Research, Oppenheimer, Wedbush and J.P. Morgan. Google is the company Huffman named; OpenAI and Google are Reddit's licensing partners.

What: Huffman said Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are the biggest factor behind Reddit's falling search referrals, with lower rankings for machine-translated pages a second factor outside the US. He said AI Mode "does not drive traffic," while Google still crawls Reddit "as hard as ever." Executives described logged-in-only Reddit, app conversion, paid user marketing and licensing talks as the response, and Wong said Reddit is "pretty skeptical of GEO."

When: The call took place on October 29, 2026, after Reddit released third-quarter results. Search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October. Logged-in-only tests begin in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Where: The referral decline affects Reddit in the US and internationally; Reddit increased user marketing outside the US to offset international losses, and the first login tests will run in select markets outside the US. Google's AI Mode operates in more than 200 countries and territories.

Why: According to Huffman, Google's AI products answer queries with Reddit content without sending users to Reddit. Because over 80% of Reddit's monetization comes from logged-in and app users, the company is prepared to trade the reach of logged-out search visitors for engagement, targeting signals and control over its data.