Reddit signaled a strategic shift toward AI-powered search during its Q4 2025 earnings call, positioning search as a potential new revenue driver.
The company said search usage rose 30% year over year, with weekly active users of Reddit Search increasing from 60 million to 80 million in 2025.
Reddit also reported rapid growth in its AI-powered product, Reddit Answers.
Weekly users of the feature increased from 1 million to 15 million over the same period.
CEO Steve Huffman said that generative AI improves Reddit’s ability to answer questions without a single definitive answer by synthesizing diverse community perspectives.
The company said it is testing media-rich, AI-generated answers and dynamic agents that appear alongside traditional search results.
Reddit has also expanded Reddit Answers into five additional languages.
While search is not yet monetized, Huffman described it as an “enormous opportunity.” Separately, Reddit said its data licensing business, which includes AI training agreements, generated $140 million in revenue in 2025, up 22% year over year.
Why This Matters Today
Search has historically been dominated by platforms that direct users to external websites.
Reddit’s approach focuses on keeping users on-platform by summarizing community knowledge into direct answers, a model well-suited to generative AI.
The growth in Reddit Answers suggests users are increasingly comfortable consuming synthesized responses rather than scrolling through long discussion threads.
That shift could change how people discover information, especially for subjective or experience-based questions.
For Reddit, AI-powered search opens multiple monetization paths.
While the company has not announced ad products tied to search, AI-generated answers could support sponsored placements, native advertising, or expanded licensing deals once adoption stabilizes.
The strategy also positions Reddit more directly against search engines and AI assistants that already surface community content.
By owning both the data and the interface, Reddit can control how its content is summarized, ranked, and potentially monetized.
As generative search becomes more common, Reddit’s role may evolve from a discussion forum to an answer engine. That transition would reshape how users, advertisers, and AI companies interact with the platform.
Our Key Takeaways:
Reddit is repositioning search as a core product rather than a secondary feature. AI-generated answers are driving rapid growth in usage. Monetization is not live yet, but it is clearly under consideration.
The shift could alter Reddit’s role in the broader search and AI ecosystem.
- Reddit said search usage rose 30% year over year, reaching 80 million weekly users.
- Reddit Answers grew from 1 million to 15 million weekly users in 2025.
- The company indicated AI-powered search could become a significant future revenue stream.
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