Reddit is going to be leaning even harder into search in the coming months. The company has already been working on a plan to integrate its LLM-powered search into its main search feature, but CEO Steve Huffman said he wants users to think of the site as an actual search engine.
During the company’s latest earnings call, Huffman said search is one of the top priorities for Reddit. “We’re concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs, improving the core product, making Reddit a go-to search engine, and expanding internationally.”
The idea of reddit as a search engine isn’t that far-fetched. Many people are already in the habit of adding “Reddit” to traditional searches in the hopes of finding relevant threads from the site. And the company has been trying to take advantage of this with its own AI-powered search product Reddit Answers. Though that feature is still labeled as being in “beta,” the company plans to eventually add it to its default search bar.
“Our focus right now is on unifying the Reddit search, like traditional search on Reddit, which is very widely used on Reddit, and the new Reddit answers product … we’re unifying those into a single search experience, and we’re going to bring that front and center in the app,” Huffman said.
Huffman’s comments come at a time when AI is increasingly eating search traffic for websites. It sounds like even Reddit, which has a multimillion-dollar data licensing deal with Google, isn’t immune from those trends either. During the call, Huffman said that Reddit’s search traffic from Google “varies week to week,” but that overall “it was a headwind” during the last quarter.
That may help explain why Huffman is so eager to make Reddit itself a search destination, even as the company continues to license its data to AI companies. “AI doesn’t invent knowledge,” he said. “It learns from us; from real people, sharing real perspectives.”