Reddit highlighted its AI-powered search engine as a potential major revenue driver during its fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday. The company updated investors on plans to merge its traditional search with the generative AI feature, Reddit Answers. Although search remains unmonetized, executives described it as an enormous market opportunity.
CEO Steve Huffman stated that generative AI search excels for queries without a single answer. “There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I think, the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people,” he said. Huffman described traditional search as navigation to find the right link or subreddit, adding that large language models can handle this task as well or better. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”
Weekly active users of Reddit’s search grew 30 percent over the past year, increasing from 60 million to 80 million. Weekly active users for the AI-powered Reddit Answers feature rose from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter. “We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential too,” Huffman noted.
Reddit is modernizing the Reddit Answers interface to deliver more media-rich responses, with pilots already in progress. The company aims to position itself as a destination for answers beyond social networking. Starting in the third quarter of 2026, Reddit plans to remove the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users. It will use AI and machine learning to personalize the site for any visitor.
In 2025, Reddit announced plans to combine Reddit Answers with its traditional search engine to enhance user experience. During the fourth quarter, the company reported significant progress in unifying core search and the AI feature. It released Reddit Answers in five new languages and began piloting dynamic agents that provide search results with media beyond text.
Reddit’s content-licensing business, which allows other companies to train AI models on its data, continues to expand. This revenue appears in the company’s “other” category, separate from advertising. Other revenue increased 8 percent year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter. For the full year 2025, it rose 22 percent to $140 million.
