Reddit is expanding access to its AI-powered search, making the product available in five more languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The enhancement is now available to users who have any of these languages as their default, expanding availability across markets such as Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.
The feature is included in Reddit Answers, a layer that runs on top of the platform’s typical keyword search. Powered by a Google AI model, the feature distills key discussions and showcases community-sourced citations, enabling you to ask nuanced questions and get a synthesized response based on recent, high-quality posts.
How the AI-driven search functions across Reddit
Type a question and Reddit’s system reads your mind (essentially, it does some intent parsing) and returns discussions on relevant subreddits as well as a fast answer with links to the original threads. It’s for questions that really only work if you’re relying on lived experience—places to visit, the best way to compare different products, DIY repairs, travel tips, and hobby argument resolutions where the collective knowledge of a crowd occasionally outpaces static web pages.
Reddit says its old-school search product is used by more than 70 million people each week, and Reddit Answers is already used by over 6 million people. During an earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman spoke of plans to keep consolidating the search experience, indicating that the AI layer is not some side experiment but an increasingly central entry point for discovery on the platform.
Focus on languages and markets for expanded access
It expands reach across Latin American countries, where community-based advice often carries more weight than a glossy marketing package. French, German, and Italian are tipping the scale for Reddit’s conversational search in Europe, making it exponentially more useful for guidance on local shopping decisions, city-specific recommendations, and regional questions of policy or consumer rights, where language nuance is key.
In the real world, a speaker of Spanish might say, “¿Qué auriculares sobre oreja recomiendan para estudiar?” and get a condensed reply mentioning popular threads on audio subreddits. A Brazilian user looking for the “melhor teclado mecânico silencioso para escritório” ought to be shown options popular among enthusiasts, complete with pros and cons plucked from actual usage. A German search like “Tipps für nachhaltige Laufbekleidung im Winter” might return climate-specific advice from runners who have been there and done that, testing gear in similar conditions.
Why this matters: context in the ongoing search wars
Chat-first search has sped up ever since generative AI tools started producing web results. Incumbents have fed summaries and conversational follow-ups into search, while newer players have gone all-in on chat-based discovery. Reddit’s twist happens to be source material: active, timestamped discussions with transparent voting and comments, both of which can make answers seem more earthbound than black-box explanations.
For Reddit, improved multilingual search is a retention play as well. If users can get queries answered without having to bounce out to other search engines, time on platform goes up and communities become more prominent. For searchers, the promise is speed—skip the manual scanning of posts, get a synthesized take, and drill down into cited threads when you want deeper context.
Quality, safety, and attribution in AI-generated answers
Of course, an AI-generated summary is only as trustworthy as its sources. Reddit Answers relies on public conversations and, crucially, provides citations back to posts, which encourages verification and gives contributors credit. That transparency is important to counter hallucinations and corral context, like upvotes, downvotes, flair, or expert tags that act as trust signals within a subreddit.
The company has leaned on safety systems and policy checks to mitigate how misinformation and harassment flow through the responses, which is a particularly acute problem in multilingual environments where idioms, sarcasm, and regional slang can trip up models. Here, Reddit has a data and content collaboration with Google: the company has publicly said it uses licensed Reddit information to develop AI and search products (on Reddit’s side, Google’s AI works as part of the Q&A).
What to watch next as Reddit expands its AI search
They will get continuously tuned as Reddit learns about what kinds of feedback the models need in each language, such as improved handling of regional dialects and community jargon. The end game seems to be a single, unified search experience that mingles keyword precision with conversational guidance. And other languages are the logical next step upon clearing minimum quality levels.
Among the key metrics to monitor are answer accuracy, citation clarity, and whether multilingual users are settling on Reddit search over alternatives. If those curves move in an upward direction, community-driven AI answers could be a default way to navigate the platform—no translation necessary.
