Reddit’s top executive says AI chatbots are not meaningfully sending users to the platform, underscoring a gap between hype around conversational search and the actual flow of clicks. In the company’s latest earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman told analysts that traffic still comes primarily from Google search and people visiting Reddit directly. He added that chatbots “are still not even rounding errors” in terms of referrals.
Search still rules Reddit’s traffic funnel over chatbots
Huffman described a stable, two-lane funnel: Google and direct visits. Asked to characterize the split, he said an orthodox distribution of 50-50 between the two is “pretty close”. That framing aligns with what many publishers report: classic web search and brand-loyal visits remain a strong conduit to content, even as users signal to AI that they just want an answer.
The upshot for Reddit is pretty straightforward. If Google’s algorithm is built to showcase community threads in organic results, the platform wins. When chatbots spit out answers but send almost no traffic, the calculus is much less certain. Huffman said AI company partnerships might strategically matter, but they aren’t translating into clicks at any volume.
AI partnerships without the clicks Reddit hopes to see
Reddit remains a rare and valuable dataset for large language models because many of its communities produce high-quality, strongly opinionated, and obviously real‑world answers that are difficult to locate in documentation or product manuals. It licensed access to its dataset at a significant scale for commercial use, signing agreements with companies like OpenAI and Google. However, the corporation has also made its positions known, taking legal action against companies like Anthropic and Perplexity for alleged misuse of content.
The business logic is evident: license the corpus, safeguard community contributions, and profit regardless of whether clicks arrive or not. Based on the observations, data‑licensing prices for major platforms contribute tens of millions of dollars annually. For Reddit, these are, in effect, an additional source of sales rather than a substitute.
Reddit recently published solid financials, with $585 million in revenue and 68% year-over-year growth. Daily active unique users hit 116 million, weekly active uniques peaked at 444 million, and the company’s international daily usage increased by 31% year over year. More than 190 million people in the United States are looking at Reddit every week. This suggests combining the platform’s core supporters with mainstream customers. Search is one place where Reddit has placed a significant effort.
Huffman mentioned that Reddit now uses its AI-powered Answers to process 20% of onsite search activity, in addition to its regular search bar, and that roughly 75 million people search on Reddit each week. As a result, the company has made significant improvements in merging AI Answers with key search functions to reduce friction and make it easier to find top-quality threads and comments faster.
- Another area is onboarding. As a teenager, Reddit is experimenting with a less difficult to start run understanding to prove its importance in minutes, matching a new client with a suitable community and position so that they do not lose hope before they have discovered their niche. “First-time blue wires were perceived new client sources,” Huffman says. Chatbots were often coded to recognize intent in conversation itself, limiting clicks outbound. As a matter of fact, while TAs like Similarweb have reiterated that the majority of key chatbots are barely referral sources for publishers, Gartner research has anticipated a decrease in double-digit conventional search operation. When the answer is adequate, customers are likely to be satisfied. However, in terms of the long-standing combination of sending a client to an open web after work.
- The design is also essential. Google’s AI Overviews, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, included references, some more often than others. For example, when the answer is excellent, general support and speech handling help the device build its own response set. This is fantastic for consumer comfort and assistant functionality. Still, it also eliminates the building block combination, which has been long in the exchange of web leader readers.
- Platforms and publishers. It all needs a lot for a visit to be a source of wisdom. The publishers are lucky friends. In terms of payouts, SEO, and zero-click, now it’s about clicking directly to feed your people to see it. Without pleading, it is crucial to negotiate a successful quest for talks. _QUOTES_PROVIDED_
The near-term watch list is clear — whether unified AI search inside Reddit lifts engagement, how legal disputes shape the boundaries of training data, and if the assistant products evolve to send more meaningful traffic. Until then, the clicks still come from the old reliables — the search box and the bookmark bar, not the chat window.
