Reddit Shifting Towards Search as Company Wants to Become a Search Engine

CNET

3 days ago

You may not need to add "Reddit" to your Google searches for much longer -- now, you can go straight to the source.
In his Q2 letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the company will integrate its search function with Reddit Answers -- currently available in the US and 11 other countries -- "into a single search experience."
Reddit will make the search box more visible on the app, bringing it "front and center."
"Whether you're a new user opening the app for the first time or returning user opening the app, that search box will be present immediately for users who open the app looking for something specific," Huffman said on the conference call. "Sometimes people are opening the app with a question."
It seems a natural direction for Reddit, which now has more than 70 million weekly active users on its search function and more than 6 million WAU using Reddit Answers. Huffman believes Reddit is ideally positioned in a world where people are increasingly wanting human-powered answers to searches driven by their massive amount of Reddit chats.
"80% of users in a recent survey that they believe some questions can only be answered by humans as opposed to AI-generated summaries," Huffman said on the call.
There does seem to be a demand for Reddit as a source of information and answers from users. Profound, a platform that helps elevate brand visibility in AI search environments, said that Reddit was the No. 1 most cited source for AI platforms Google Overviews and Perplexity, and No. 2 for ChatGPT among searches. Profound said that Reddit's percentage on Perplexity, 46.7%, showed a "strong preference for community-generated content" among searchers.
Vanessa Fox, digital marketing consultant and author of Marketing in the Age of Google, called Reddit's shift toward search a wise one.
"It's a smart idea as it's certainly the case that people seek out Reddit specifically when searching Google by adding 'reddit' to their search query, and so the demand is there," Fox told CNET. "With apps becoming such a standard part of the online experience, people have gotten even more accustomed to using search experiences other than Google for specific types of content -- TikTok is an obvious example of that."
In its 2025 Q2 earnings report, Reddit showed a 78% jump in revenue from a year earlier, to $500 million. Huffman said daily active users are now at 110 million, an increase of 21% from last year at this same time.
Fox added that Reddit will need to be watchful for more AI spam.
"When Google started featuring Reddit results more prominently in search results, spammers -- many using AI content -- flocked to Reddit and started posting in threads that already ranked well in Google, as well as creating new posts in Reddit in an attempt to use the ranking power of Reddit to show up in Google," Fox told CNET. "Reddit now has to combat that. So if this unified search is successful, they likely will have to combat even more AI content, which unfortunately is the landscape that we're in."