Reddit Bets on AI Search as Its Next Big Business Play After Explosive User Growth

Reddit is making its clearest push yet to redefine itself as an information platform, not just a social network. On its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call this week, the company positioned AI-powered search as a central pillar of its future growth, calling it “an enormous market and opportunity” even though the product has not yet been monetized.

The announcement comes as Reddit’s AI search product, known as Reddit Answers, shows rapid adoption and as competition intensifies in the race to reinvent search using generative AI.

AI Search Moves from Experiment to Strategy

During the earnings call on February 5, CEO Steve Huffman framed AI-powered search as one of Reddit’s most important long-term opportunities. While avoiding firm revenue timelines, he made it clear that search, particularly AI-driven search, could eventually become a major contributor to the company’s business.

Reddit’s argument is straightforward. The platform believes it is uniquely positioned to answer questions that do not have a single correct response. These include subjective queries, advice-seeking prompts, and real-world troubleshooting where context and lived experience matter more than facts alone.

According to Huffman, Reddit excels at “questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people.” That framing places Reddit in direct competition with traditional search engines and newer AI-native products such as OpenAI’s SearchGPT and Perplexity.

Growth Numbers Strengthen Reddit’s Case

The company backed up its strategic shift with striking usage data.

• Reddit’s traditional search reached 80 million weekly active users, up 30 percent year over year from 60 million.
• Reddit Answers grew from 1 million weekly active users in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the end of the year, representing a 15-fold increase in nine months.

These figures suggest that users are increasingly comfortable relying on Reddit not just for browsing communities, but for actively finding answers.

Reddit Answers was first introduced in December 2024 as a conversational AI tool that summarizes discussions across the platform and points users to relevant threads and subreddits. Unlike conventional search results, it emphasizes synthesis rather than ranking, presenting multiple viewpoints instead of a single authoritative answer.

Blending Traditional and AI Search

Reddit’s next step is to merge its AI search experience with its existing search engine into a single, unified product. The company said it made “significant progress” on this effort during the fourth quarter.

Several new developments are already underway:

• Reddit Answers has been rolled out in five additional languages beyond English.
• The company is piloting dynamic, agent-based search experiences capable of handling more complex, multi-step queries.
• Search results are being tested with media beyond text, including richer visual elements.

Together, these changes signal an effort to make Reddit search feel less like an archive of links and more like a destination for discovery and understanding.

Personalization Without Login Barriers

One of the more notable shifts discussed on the call was Reddit’s plan to remove the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users by the third quarter of 2026.

Using AI and machine learning, Reddit aims to personalize the experience for all visitors, regardless of whether they have an account. This move suggests the company wants to compete for casual search traffic, not just its core user base, and position itself as a broader information resource across the web.

If successful, this would represent a significant change for a platform historically defined by user accounts and community participation.

Monetization Remains an Open Question

Despite the momentum, Reddit has not yet begun monetizing AI search. Huffman was careful to describe it as a long-term opportunity rather than an immediate revenue stream.

Potential monetization paths could include advertising integrated into AI-generated results, premium features for advanced search capabilities, or licensing and API access for third parties. For now, however, investors are being asked to focus on adoption and engagement rather than short-term returns.

That caution reflects the broader uncertainty facing AI-powered search across the industry, where usage growth has often outpaced clear business models.

A New Front in the AI Search Race

Reddit’s announcement places it firmly in the expanding battle over how people find information online. Unlike competitors that rely on crawling or partnerships, Reddit owns its content and the conversations behind it. That gives the company a structural advantage in surfacing context, credibility signals, and diverse opinions.

Whether that advantage can translate into sustainable revenue remains to be seen. But with AI search usage growing rapidly and traditional search behavior shifting, Reddit is signaling that it intends to be more than a place for discussion. It wants to be a place where people come for answers, even when those answers are messy, subjective, and deeply human.