Reddit CEO Says Google AI Search Will Not Drive Traffic as Weekly Referrals Fall by More Than a Million

Reddit's chief executive has delivered one of the bluntest public assessments yet of what Google's AI search features are doing to the open web. Speaking on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call, Steve Huffman said Google's AI search modes "won't drive traffic," adding that this held true "for Reddit, and, as far as I know, for others as well." The company disclosed that search referrals from Google fell by more than 1 million per week on average in October.

The numbers behind the statement are stark. Reddit's stock plunged about 30 percent on October 30, the day it reported quarterly results and warned that Google's AI search features were cutting its referral traffic. The business itself is still growing fast: third-quarter revenue jumped 53 percent year over year to $895 million, but US daily users slipped 2 percent to 50.7 million, an unusual dip for a platform that has spent years compounding its audience.

Huffman attributed part of the traffic problem to AI Mode and AI Overviews changing the search experience. Links that once sat near the top of a results page are now pushed further down beneath AI-generated summaries, and Reddit said machine-translated content in other languages ranks lower still, which hits the platform hardest outside the United States. Notably, Huffman said Google's crawling of Reddit remains as strong as ever, and that "Reddit" is still a popular search term on Google. The demand, in other words, has not gone away. What has changed is that Google no longer routes it back.

The company's response is to stop being a destination that depends on search at all. Reddit is pushing users toward direct, logged-in visits: it has announced that everyone will be required to log in, a change it frames as benefiting user experience, advertising, safety and data protection. It has launched a "For You" recommendation feed, and since August it has been testing AI conversion of posts into short-form videos, an attempt to keep its content circulating inside its own app rather than as fragments in someone else's summary.

That strategy has a logic beyond traffic. Reddit is one of the most heavily licensed and crawled sources in the AI era, and a logged-in, app-first audience gives it both negotiating leverage over model makers and first-party data for advertisers. But it also accepts a hard trade: the platform is deliberately shrinking its casual, anonymous reach in exchange for a smaller but more controllable and monetizable user base.

Google, for its part, has consistently pushed back on the idea that AI search is draining the web. Search chief Liz Reid has said click volume from Google remains "relatively stable," and that AI search sends more clicks to a wider variety of sites, including forums. Google's Nick Fox told the BBC that "from our point of view, the web is thriving." Reddit's earnings call is the most direct contradiction of that position to come from a platform of its scale, delivered with its own numbers attached.

For publishers and platforms watching from the sidelines, the dispute marks a structural break in the fifteen-year bargain between search engines and content creators. If AI answers satisfy queries inside the results page, the traffic that funded the web's content layer keeps shrinking, and platforms with direct audience relationships, like Reddit, will be the ones best positioned to charge for what AI systems increasingly consume.