In a strategic pivot aimed at reshaping its financial future, Reddit has identified its AI-powered search capabilities as its next monumental opportunity. During its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, executives outlined a vision where generative AI search becomes a core revenue driver, moving the platform beyond its traditional social media roots.
CEO Steve Huffman articulated a clear distinction in search paradigms, describing traditional search as navigation for finding specific links, while positioning Reddit's AI search, called Reddit Answers, as superior for complex, subjective queries requiring multiple human perspectives. "There's a type of query we're, I think, particularly good at—I would argue, the best on the internet—which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people," Huffman stated. The company believes generative AI search will ultimately prove "better for most queries."
The potential is underscored by remarkable user adoption metrics. Weekly active users for Reddit's overall search function grew 30% year-over-year, surging from 60 million to 80 million. More strikingly, weekly active users for the AI-specific Reddit Answers feature exploded from 1 million in Q1 2025 to 15 million by Q4 2025.
Although search remains unmonetized, Reddit's leadership explicitly called it "an enormous market and opportunity." The path to revenue is twofold: first, by eventually monetizing the search experience for users, and second, through its already operational content licensing business. This division allows other AI companies to legally train their models on Reddit's data.
Reddit's "other" revenue segment, which includes AI data licensing, increased 8% year-over-year in Q4 2025 to $36 million. For the full year 2025, this segment reached $140 million, representing a substantial 22% increase, providing critical diversification beyond advertising.
Concurrently, Reddit is fundamentally re-engineering the user experience. A landmark change, set for Q3 2026, will eliminate the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users. The platform will use AI to personalize content dynamically for every visitor, aiming to capture users who arrive via search engines without creating accounts.
Technically, Reddit has made "significant progress" in unifying core search with its AI feature and is modernizing Reddit Answers to deliver more media-rich responses. The feature also expanded its linguistic reach in Q4, launching support for five new languages.
