Reddit’s leadership has named the force draining its search traffic: Google’s AI search products. On the company’s third-quarter 2026 earnings call on October 29, CEO Steve Huffman told analysts that AI Overviews and AI Mode are the biggest reason fewer people arrive from Google.
The warning behind the call is stark. Reddit said its roughly 130 million daily active uniques could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if current trends continue. Search referrals dropped by more than 1 million on average per week in October.
Google’s AI search absorbs the click
AI Overviews put an AI-written answer above conventional results. AI Mode goes further: Gemini breaks a query into sub-searches and returns a single conversational answer. Both change what happens to an organic link.
Huffman put it plainly: “The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know.” His broader point is that Google has shifted from sending visitors to the rest of the internet to keeping more of the answer on its own page.
The independent data points the same way. Ahrefs found AI Overviews reduced click-through for position-one results by 58% on affected keywords. A randomized experiment from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon measured a 39.8% drop in outbound organic clicks. Chartbeat reported search fell from 21% of North American publisher pageviews a year earlier to 12% in the third quarter of 2026. Alphabet’s own Q3 showed Google Search revenue growth cooling from 17% to 12%, with AI Mode queries named as a factor.
Why logged-out users are the visible loss
Reddit’s logged-out audience is the most exposed. In Q3, logged-out visitors averaged 76.8 million of 130.3 million daily active uniques; logged-in users made up 53.5 million. That gap is the part Reddit now plans to shrink on purpose.
COO Jen Wong summed up the reason: over 80% of monetization sits with logged-in in-app users because they bring far more engagement and frequency than search-referred logged-out visitors. Reddit still guided to fourth-quarter revenue of $1.0 billion to $1.03 billion, or 38% to 42% growth, even while warning about the user number.
What marketers should do now
Reddit’s response is a case study in owning the relationship. It will test a primarily logged-in experience outside the US in Q4, push users to its app, and spend on user marketing to buy back reach internationally. Huffman described the trade-off directly: “We’ll likely be trading reach for engagement.”
- Track AI Overview and AI Mode visibility separately from classic blue-link rankings.
- Build app, email and community channels that can re-engage users without another Google referral.
- Test a login or app wall only when you can monetize a smaller audience better, as Reddit claims it can.
Google’s position is that AI features send billions of clicks to websites every week. Reddit is not counting on a reversal. For marketing teams, the lesson is to treat Google AI surfaces as answer engines, not guaranteed traffic, and to build a direct destination before the next rollout changes the equation again.
Source: PPC Land
