Finally people are using Reddit search

After being plagued by complaints that its search function needed improvement, Reddit has in the past few years invested in its search engine and also added artificial intelligence features to help its users find what they’re looking for. The investment finally appears to be paying off: The company has seen a 30% year-over-year jump in the number of people using search each week, CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday.

Hoffman noted that search was one of the main drivers of user acquisition and retention on the platform.

“In search, we’ve seen great performance. Daily user units, WAUs and queries in search are up significantly year over year. It’s a great driver of retention and active user units. I think the search team, quite frankly, is doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see that it’s been better integrated into the product,” he said in the company’s first-quarter conference call after the results.

Earlier in February, the platform began testing product placement through AI research results in the United States

About 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% of shoppers feel more confident in their purchasing decisions after searching on Reddit, Hoffman said.

The social media platform ended the quarter with more than 493 million weekly active unique users (WAUq), a 23% increase from the same period last year, and nearly 126 million daily active unique users (DAUq), a 17% improvement from the previous year.

Reddit reported a 7% improvement in visitors in the US, to 53.5 million visitors per day, and 73.3 million visitors per day internationally, an increase of 26%. The company said it plans to reach 1 billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the United States

In addition to search, the company said that the machine translation feature, which now supports more than 30 languages, has contributed to significant user growth in the past few quarters.

Reddit reported revenue of $663 million in the first quarter of 2026, beating Wall Street expectations of $609.8 million. The company also said it spent just $1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.