Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just as a product, but as a revenue driver affecting its bottom line. During the company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, the company offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and artificial search, suggesting that while search is not yet monetized, “it’s a huge market and opportunity.”
In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.”
“I think there’s a kind of question that we’re particularly good at — I’d say the best on the internet — which are questions that don’t have any answers and are actually answered by multiple perspectives from a lot of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the right link for a topic or subreddit, he said. But LLMs can be just as good at this, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.
The exec also noted that weekly active users for search have increased by 30% over the past year, from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the number of weekly active users on AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million in the fourth quarter.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential there as well,” Huffman added.
Reddit said it is working to modernize the AI reply interface by making its replies more media-rich, and pilots are already underway.
The company is also thinking about how it could position itself as not just a social site, but a place where people come for answers. Reddit said in a call to investors that starting in the third quarter of 2026, it will close the gap between logged-in and logged-out users as it focuses on personalizing the site — using AI and machine learning — and making it relevant to whoever turns up.
The company announced in 2025 that it plans to combine its AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and AI functionality. It has also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents alongside search results that include “non-text media”.
Although Reddit sees value in its AI responses, it hasn’t kept it to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on its data, is also growing. This business revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenue (ie non-advertising revenue). That “other” revenue grew 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and rose 22% to $140 million in 2025.