Reddit suggested on Thursday that AI-powered search engines could be the next big opportunity for businesses — not just in terms of products, but as a revenue driver that affects their bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company offered an update on its plans to combine traditional search and AI and signaled that while search has yet to be monetized, “it’s a huge market and opportunity.”
In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for many queries.”
“There are types of questions, I think are really good — I’d argue, the best on the internet — that are questions that don’t have an answer, where the answer is really a lot of perspectives from a lot of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit, he said. But an LLM can be just as good, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going to go.”
Exec also noted that weekly active users for search over the past year increased by 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, weekly active users for AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million in the fourth quarter.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential,” Huffman added.
Reddit says it’s working on modernizing its AI answer interface by making its responses more media-friendly, and this pilot is already underway.
The company is also thinking about how to position itself when it is not just a social site, but a place where people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the phone that it will not distinguish between logged-in and logged-in users from Q3 2026, as it aims to make the site – using AI and machine learning – and match anyone who shows up.
The company announced in 2025 planning to combine AI search feature, Reddit’s answerwith traditional search engines to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in integrating its core search and AI features. It also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and piloted dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”
Although Reddit sees value in AI answers, it doesn’t stick. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train AI models on data, is also growing. The business’s revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenue (ie, non-advertising revenue). This “other” revenue increased 8% year over year to $36 million in Q4, and is up 22% to $140 million by 2025.