Reddit is testing interactive product carousels inside its search results for a small group of U.S. users, pulling from Dynamic Product Ads partner catalogs and community discussions to surface buy links.
Reddit this week disclosed that it is testing a new AI-powered shopping feature inside its search results, embedding interactive product carousels with pricing, images, and direct purchase links directly within the platform's native search experience. The announcement, published on February 19, 2026, marks a notable shift in how the platform handles commercial intent from its users - and how it monetises that intent.
The feature is currently limited to a small group of U.S.-based users. According to Reddit, "search results will now include interactive product carousels with pricing, images, and direct where-to-buy links" when those searches are relevant to products or categories. The platform frames the test as an extension of its existing community knowledge base, not a departure from it.
The mechanism is specific. When a user submits a product-related query - Reddit cites examples like "best noise-canceling headphones" or "electronic gift ideas for a college student" - a related products carousel appears at the bottom of the search results page. According to Reddit's official announcement, "the carousel highlights products directly mentioned by users from real conversations on related posts and comments, and it includes details such as pricing and images."
Tapping a product card opens a detail view, from which users can navigate to select retailers, read more, or complete a purchase. The flow keeps users within Reddit's environment for discovery before directing them outward only at the final step.
For the initial phase, the test applies specifically to queries about consumer electronics. In that category, Reddit is also populating the carousels with products sourced from its Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) partner catalogs - not just from community discussions. This dual sourcing is technically significant. It means the carousels are not purely organic; they are partly populated by the same commercial product feeds that advertisers already use to run DPA campaigns on the platform.
Reddit launched Dynamic Product Ads to general availability in May 2025, reporting at launch that advertisers using DPA alongside standard conversion campaigns achieved double the return on ad spend. The Home Depot, one of the early beta adopters, reported almost 400% higher incremental ROAS than its average across other social platforms. By integrating DPA catalogs into organic search carousels, Reddit is now extending that commercial infrastructure into the search layer of the product - a surface that was previously ad-free in terms of product listings.
Reddit's internal search has been growing rapidly. Over 80 million people searched directly on Reddit every week in Q4 2025, up from 60 million a year earlier. The platform has been unifying its core search with Reddit Answers, an AI-powered conversational search tool launched earlier in 2025, and the company has described its goal as building "a global, unified, and modern search experience." Search volume per user has increased consistently as Reddit positions itself as a starting point for research rather than a destination people arrive at from Google.
In Q3 2025, Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that external search traffic from Google remained essentially flatduring the quarter, suggesting that organic and paid user acquisition - not referrals from search engines - drove the platform's continued expansion to 116 million daily active unique users at the time. The shopping carousel test sits within this broader strategic logic: if users are already conducting purchase research on Reddit, the platform wants to capture the transaction alongside the conversation.
Reddit's own data, cited across multiple product announcements, claims that over half of all online conversations related to purchasing decisions take place on the platform. That internal figure - unverified by third parties - has underpinned the company's pitch to e-commerce advertisers throughout its advertising product expansion in 2025.
What makes the Reddit shopping carousel test structurally different from comparable features on, say, Google Shopping or Meta's catalog ads is the sourcing logic. Reddit is explicitly building the carousel from community-generated content first, then supplementing with partner catalogs. According to the company, "this feature surfaces top-recommended products directly from discussions, giving redditors instant information about any product."
That framing positions the feature as a navigation tool built on community trust rather than a traditional ad placement. Whether users perceive it that way in practice will depend heavily on how clearly the carousel distinguishes between organically recommended products and those pulled from paid DPA partner feeds.
Glenn Gabe, President of G-Squared Interactive LLC and a widely followed search industry commentator, noted the test publicly on LinkedIn, describing it as "another shot across the bow of Google" for e-commerce. In his comments section, Brad Brewer drew a comparison to Shopify's Product Network, which allows merchants to surface and earn from cross-brand products inside their own storefronts. "Reddit is now doing the same with high intent search inside community content," Brewer wrote. Saqlain Zafar added a simpler observation: "Platforms that host discussion now want the transaction too."
That tension - between hosting discussions and facilitating transactions - is at the heart of what this test represents. Reddit has spent years cultivating its reputation as a place where product advice is peer-generated and therefore more trustworthy than advertiser-produced content. Research cited by Reddit itself has positioned it as the most trustworthy platform for informing product and brand decisions. Commercialising that trust through shopping carousels is a calculated bet that the community reputation will transfer to the commerce layer.
The test arrives against a backdrop of aggressive advertising product development at Reddit. Reddit's Max campaigns, which use AI to automate bidding and creative combinations, launched in late 2025 with reported cost-per-action reductions of 17%. The WooCommerce integration, announced in November 2025, brought DPA capabilities to small-to-medium sized merchants with minimal technical setup. Interactive Ads launched in November 2025 with Paramount Pictures and Electronic Arts as early partners.
Underneath these product launches, Reddit's financial trajectory has been steep. The company reported $726 million in revenue in Q4 2025, with advertising revenue growing approximately 70% year-over-year. DPA in particular performed strongly during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, with lower-funnel conversion volume doubling year-over-year. Placing DPA catalog products inside organic search carousels could extend that performance further by capturing purchase intent at an earlier point in the user journey - before users leave to search elsewhere.
The shopping carousel test also follows Reddit's Smartly integration, made generally available in June 2025, which enabled automated DPA campaign launches directly from the Smartly platform using existing product feeds. The infrastructure for catalog-based commerce advertising on Reddit has been building steadily throughout 2025; the search carousel is its logical extension into organic surfaces.
The broader competitive context matters for marketers evaluating where purchase-intent audiences can be reached. Social search has become a contested space. TikTok's search reliability has deteriorated under the weight of shopping content saturation, according to documented user complaints. YouTube's search serves visual how-to queries effectively. Reddit, by contrast, has built a search experience around community knowledge and product research - a combination that, if paired with a frictionless commerce layer, could position it more directly against Google Shopping for mid-funnel product discovery.
For performance marketers, the most immediately relevant question is whether impressions generated inside the carousel will be measurable and attributable. Reddit has moved consistently toward better measurement infrastructure. Google Analytics 4 launched native Reddit Ads cost data import in July 2025, automating previously manual tracking processes. How the new shopping carousels interact with existing Pixel and Conversion API tracking will determine whether advertisers can close the attribution loop from search carousel impression to off-site purchase.
Reddit has indicated that the test will evolve based on user behavior. According to the company's announcement, "we'll continue learning from how people use this new feature and refine the experience over time." No timeline has been provided for expansion beyond U.S. electronics queries or for a broader rollout.
Who: Reddit, Inc., targeting a small group of U.S.-based users through its search product, with Dynamic Product Ads partner brands populating part of the carousel inventory.
What: An AI-powered shopping feature that displays interactive product carousels - including pricing, images, and direct purchase links - at the bottom of search results pages for product-related queries, drawing from both community discussions and DPA partner catalogs.
When: The test was announced on February 19, 2026, with no public timeline given for expansion or broader rollout.
Where: Inside Reddit's native search results, initially limited to U.S. users submitting consumer electronics queries.
Why: Reddit is seeking to convert its established purchase-intent search traffic into a direct commerce surface, extending the commercial reach of its existing DPA advertising infrastructure into organic search while keeping community-sourced recommendations at the centre of the user experience.
