Reddit suggested Thursday that its artificial intelligence search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just as a product, but as a revenue driver that impacts its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, the company offered an update on its plans to merge traditional search and artificial intelligence, and hinted that while search hasn’t been won yet, “it’s a huge market and opportunity.”
Specifically, the company believes AI genetic search will be “better for most queries.”
“There’s one type of question that we’re, I think, particularly good at — I’d say, the best on the web — which are questions that don’t have answers, where the answer is actually multiple perspectives from multiple people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the right link in a topic or subreddit, he said. But LLMs can be just as good at that, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”
The exec also noted that weekly active users for search grew by 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, weekly active users for AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential as well,” Huffman added.
Reddit said it is working to modernize its AI replies interface, making its replies more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.
The company is also thinking about how it can position itself when it’s not just a social networking site, but a place people come to for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it is removing the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in the third quarter of 2026 as it aims to personalize the site — using artificial intelligence and machine learning — and make it relevant to whoever comes on.
The company announced in 2025 that it planned 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 integrating its core search and AI capability. It also released five new languages to Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”
While Reddit sees value in its AI answers, it doesn’t keep 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, its non-advertising revenue). That “other” revenue rose 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and rose 22% to $140 million by 2025.
