Reddit’s chief executive says Google’s AI search features are no longer sending people to his site. Steve Huffman told investors on the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call that AI Mode and AI Overviews have changed the rules of search traffic.
The numbers back him up. Reddit disclosed that search referrals in October fell by more than one million visits per week on average. That drop landed in the same quarter the company reported its latest results.
“It used to be a traffic driver, now it’s not”
“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.”
He argued that AI Overviews and AI Mode have grown a lot since launch. At a minimum, both products push ordinary search links further down the page. Users get their answer without clicking through to the source.
Huffman also pointed to a second problem. Reddit believes its machine-translated pages are now ranked lower in search results. That penalty would mostly hit the company outside the United States, where translated content carries more weight.
Google is feeling its own pressure from the same shift. The company said this week that it is seeing “lower monetization” in AI Mode ads. It is now rolling those ad formats out to more countries.
Reddit still bets on being a daily habit
None of this means people have lost interest in Reddit. Huffman noted that Reddit remains a “top search term in Google” and that Google is “crawling us as hard as ever.” In his view, demand is intact and distribution is what broke.
So Reddit is trying to turn itself into what Huffman calls a “direct, sticky, daily destination.” It launched a “For You” recommendation feed yesterday. In August, it began testing a tool that turns posts into short videos with AI.
The company also confirmed it will soon require everyone to log in. Huffman says the change is better for user experience, better for the ads business, safer under current regulations, and more protective of Reddit data. Our earlier report on r/opensource showed how quickly Reddit’s policy decisions travel through its communities.
For publishers, the lesson is blunt. Ranking well is no longer enough when the answer box eats the click. Read the full Verge report by Jay Peters for the earnings call details.
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