Reddit will require logins as AI search answers cut its Google traffic

Reddit plans to require people to log in to use the site, CEO Steve Huffman told shareholders Oct. 29, Ars Technica and TechCrunch reported.  He said visits from search engines have dropped as AI tools answer questions directly.

For years, many people found Reddit posts through Google searches.  Now AI summaries at the top of search results often give the answer without a click.  Reddit said search referrals, or visitors sent by search engines, fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October, TechCrunch reported.

Reddit is not alone.  Google's AI Overviews, AI-written summaries at the top of results, launched in 2024, and people click less when they appear.  A Pew Research Center study of 900 U.S. adults' browsing in March 2025 found users clicked a regular search link on 8% of visits to results pages with an AI summary, versus 15% when there was none.  They clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time.

News sites are losing visitors too.  The share of news searches that end without a click to a news site rose from 56% to nearly 69% in the year after AI Overviews launched in May 2024, research firm Similarweb found, TechCrunch reported.  Chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT send some readers to news sites, but not nearly enough to make up for the loss, Similarweb said.

Huffman wrote that logged-in users are more engaged and give Reddit more "signals for ads targeting," meaning clues about their interests.  A login wall also helps "protect access" to Reddit's posts, which AI companies want for training, he wrote.  Reddit sells that data to AI makers through licensing deals, TechCrunch said.

Reddit will test the change in some countries outside the U.S. this quarter, Ars reported.  The company's revenue rose 53% to $895 million in its latest quarter, but U.S. daily users fell to 50.7 million from 53.2 million in the prior quarter.

The shift also worries investors in Google, which makes most of its money from ads shown with search results.  Its parent company, Alphabet, said Oct. 28 that revenue from Google Search and related services rose 12% from a year earlier to $63.4 billion in the July-to-September quarter, and that the number of searches grew at its fastest pace in five years.  But that revenue missed Wall Street's estimates for the second quarter in a row, and its growth has slowed from 19% in the first quarter, CNBC reported.

Google's business chief, Philipp Schindler, said currency swings were the biggest cause, but he acknowledged that ads in AI Mode, Google's chatbot-style search, so far earn less money than regular search ads, Search Engine Land reported.  Alphabet's stock fell about 13% on Oct. 29.  "Investors will now worry" that "AI has finally come for Google," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria wrote, though he cautioned against drawing conclusions from one quarter.

Source:  Ars Technica, Oct. 29, 2026, TechCrunch, Oct. 29, 2026, Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025, TechCrunch, July 2, 2025, Alphabet, Oct. 28, 2026, CNBC, Oct. 29, 2026 and Search Engine Land, Oct. 29, 2026.