Reddit’s Google Visits Fell by 1 Million a Week. It Blames AI Mode

Reddit says the visits it gets from Google search fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October. It blames Google’s AI answers, which reply to questions on the results page instead of sending people on. Its answer is to make everyone log in. This is DailyAI’s analysis: the login wall makes sense for Reddit, and it is a warning for everyone who relies on Google for visitors.

The numbers

The figure comes from Reddit’s third-quarter letter to shareholders, published on 29 October. Search referrals, meaning visits that arrive from a search engine, were already “down meaningfully” in the three months to September, and the decline sped up late in the quarter. It has carried on into October.

Reddit then gives a warning. If the trend continues, its daily visitors could fall by a “low-double-digit percentage” this quarter from about 130 million. Read plainly, a 10% fall would mean about 13 million fewer people visiting each day. In the US, daily visitors are already down 2% on a year ago, to 50.7 million.

None of this shows up in the money yet. Revenue rose 53% to $895 million and net income reached $283 million, according to Reddit’s results release. It expects $1.00 billion to $1.03 billion of revenue in the current quarter. Investors still looked at the visitor numbers first. The shares fell more than 15% after the results, CNBC reported.

What Reddit blames

Chief executive Steve Huffman was blunt on the earnings call. “The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic,” he said, as quoted by The Verge. “Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know.”

AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-style search. It writes an answer instead of showing a list of links. AI Overviews, the summaries at the top of ordinary results, work in a similar way. Huffman says both now push everything else down the page. He also thinks Google ranks Reddit’s machine-translated posts lower outside the US. Google, meanwhile, is “crawling us as hard as ever”, he said. Google is also putting ads into AI Mode in 10 more countries, so the format is spreading, not shrinking.

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The login wall

Reddit’s response is to move to what it calls “a logged-in-only experience”. It will begin testing this fully in some markets outside the US this quarter, then roll out a version worldwide. The letter gives four reasons: a better experience, more data to target ads, protection for Reddit’s “extremely valuable corpus of data”, and new rules on safety around the world.

Our view

This section is DailyAI’s opinion. On Reddit’s own figures, the move is logical. Logged-in and app users bring in over 80% of the money Reddit makes from its audience, the letter says, and both groups grew last quarter. The casual visitors who arrive from Google and leave without signing in earn Reddit little, and Google is sending fewer of them anyway. Closing the door costs less than it would have a year ago.

The awkward part is the relationship with Google. In 2024 Google gained access to Reddit’s Data API, a direct feed of its posts, so that it could “display, train on, and otherwise use” the content. Google said then that the deal would make it easier to take part in Reddit communities. Two years on, its AI reads Reddit and answers with it, while Reddit says it sends fewer people to the source. That is the trade many publishers fear, and Reddit is one of the few with enough leverage to push back.

For ordinary users the change is practical. Adding “reddit” to a Google search has become a common way to find answers from real people. If Reddit goes login-only, that shortcut gains a sign-up step. Some people will make an account. Others will settle for the AI summary, which is exactly the habit that is draining Reddit’s traffic in the first place.

There is a risk for Reddit too. Login walls put off casual readers, and casual readers are how many people become regular users. Reddit admits search is “a common source of reengagement”, so it is giving up some future members to protect current ones. It is betting that people want Reddit enough to sign in. Huffman points out that “Reddit” is still one of Google’s most searched words, which supports that bet, but only partly.

What to watch

Two numbers will show whether the bet works. The first is Reddit’s daily visitor count for this quarter, against the 130 million base. The second is what happens in the markets where it tests the login wall, which Reddit has not named. If visitors fall by less than it warned, other sites will be tempted to follow. If they fall by more, it will show how much of the web now depends on Google’s goodwill.