On Thursday, Reddit suggested that its AI-powered search engine could represent the next big opportunity for its business – not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver that impacts the bottom line. On Thursday, during its fourth-quarter earnings call, the company provided an update on its plans to combine traditional search and AI-powered search and suggested that while search is not yet profitable, “it is a huge market and opportunity.”
In particular, the company believes that AI generative search will be “better for most queries.”
“I think there's a certain type of query that we're particularly good at – I would say the best on the Internet – which are questions that have no answers and the answer is really a lot of perspectives from a lot of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Meanwhile, traditional search is more like navigation – a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit. But this is also where LLM colleges can be good, if not better, he said. “So that's the direction we're headed.”
The executive also noted that the number of weekly active search users has increased 30% over the past year, from 60 million to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the number of weekly active users of AI-powered Reddit Answers increased from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million in the fourth quarter.
“We see a lot of development there and I think there is a lot of potential there as well,” Huffman added.
Reddit said it is working to modernize its AI Reply interface, increasing its multimedia content, and pilots of this are already underway.
The company is also thinking about how it can position itself since it's not just a social media site, but a place where people come for answers. During the call, Reddit told investors that starting in the third quarter of 2026, it will eliminate the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users as it aims to personalize the site — using artificial intelligence and machine learning — and adapt it to everyone who comes.
In 2025, the company announced that it planned to combine Reddit Answers' AI search feature with a traditional search engine to improve the end-user experience. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and artificial intelligence features. It has also rolled out five new languages to Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents with search results that include “beyond text media.”
While Reddit sees value in AI responses, it doesn't keep it to itself. The company's content licensing business is also growing, allowing other companies to train their artificial intelligence models on its data. Revenue from this activity is reported as part of Reddit's “other” revenue (i.e., non-advertising revenue). This “other” revenue increased 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and increased 22% to $140 million in 2025.
