Reddit just signaled its biggest strategic pivot yet - turning its community-driven platform into an AI search powerhouse. During Thursday's Q4 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman revealed that weekly users of Reddit Answers exploded from 1 million to 15 million in just nine months, while traditional search hit 80 million weekly users. The company's betting this convergence will unlock what it calls an "enormous market and opportunity," even as the feature remains unmonetized.
Reddit is making a bold bet that AI search could become its next major revenue stream, and the numbers suggest it might be onto something. During Thursday's fourth-quarter earnings call, the social platform revealed explosive growth in its AI-powered search feature while hinting at massive monetization potential ahead.
The star of the show is Reddit Answers, the company's conversational AI search tool that launched in late 2024. Weekly active users skyrocketed from just 1 million in Q1 2025 to 15 million by Q4 - a 15x surge that caught even investors' attention. Meanwhile, Reddit's traditional search functionality isn't exactly sitting idle, hitting 80 million weekly users with 30% year-over-year growth.
"There's a type of query we're, I think, particularly good at - I would argue, the best on the internet - which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people," CEO Steve Huffman told investors during the earnings call. It's a pitch that positions Reddit squarely against Google's traditional search dominance and emerging AI competitors like OpenAI's SearchGPT.
But here's the kicker - Reddit isn't monetizing search yet. Huffman was careful to frame it as "an enormous market and opportunity" without committing to timelines. Still, the company's racing to merge its traditional and AI search experiences into a unified product that CEO believes will be "better for most queries" thanks to large language models.
