Reddit's CEO: Google's AI Mode "Does Not Drive Traffic" — to Anyone
Steve Huffman says search referrals have dropped by more than a million a week as Reddit races to build a direct relationship with users.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman delivered a blunt verdict on Google's AI-powered search tools during the company's Q3 2026 earnings call: they don't send people anywhere.
"The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic," Huffman said. "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."
The comment lands alongside a specific, painful number. Reddit said search traffic in October dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week, and Huffman pointed to Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode as a significant factor behind that decline. Both features sit at the top of Google search results, generating AI-written summaries that can answer a user's question without requiring a click to the source — in this case, often a Reddit thread.
Huffman said these tools have "evolved a lot" and that, at minimum, they now push every organic result further down the page. He also flagged a narrower but notable problem: Reddit believes its content that's machine-translated into other languages is getting ranked lower in search results, which would hit the company hardest outside the US.
What makes Huffman's framing interesting is what he didn't blame. He was careful to separate Google's traffic patterns from actual demand for Reddit. The platform, he said, remains a "top search term in Google," and Google is "crawling us as hard as ever" — meaning the underlying interest in Reddit's content hasn't gone anywhere. "This doesn't say anything about the internet consumers' demand for Reddit," Huffman said. "People still want Reddit. It says Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to."
It's a distinction that matters for how Reddit is positioning this problem to investors: not a demand crisis, but a distribution one. Google changed how its search results work, and that shift happens to cut against sites like Reddit that have historically relied on search clicks to bring in visitors.
Reddit isn't alone in feeling this. Publishers across the web have spent much of the past year arguing that AI-generated answers are quietly strangling the traffic that used to flow from search, since users get what they need from the summary and never click through. Google itself isn't immune to the fallout — the company said yesterday that it's seeing "lower monetization" from AI Mode ads, even as it moves to expand AI ads to more countries.
Betting on direct traffic instead
Reddit's response is to stop depending on Google's goodwill. Huffman described an effort to turn Reddit into a "direct, sticky, daily destination" — company-speak for getting people to open the app or site out of habit rather than arriving via a search result they half-forgot they clicked.
The moves back that up. Reddit rolled out a new "For You" feed yesterday, built to surface content based on a user's interests rather than requiring them to hunt it down. In August, the company started testing an AI feature that converts text posts into short videos, a format built for scrolling rather than searching.
Reddit also announced a more sweeping change today: it's going to require everyone to log in to use the platform. Huffman framed that as a win on multiple fronts, saying it will be "better for user experience, better for our ads business, is more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit data." Requiring logins also gives Reddit cleaner data on who's actually using the platform and how, which matters both for ad targeting and for building the kind of direct relationship Huffman says he wants.
Taken together, the earnings call reads as an admission that Reddit can no longer count on Google to be the front door it once was. The company is trying to build its own instead.
