Reddit is looking to AI research as its next big opportunity

Reddit suggested Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver that impacts its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, it offered an update on its plans to merge traditional search and AI-based search together, and hinted that while search has not yet been monetized, it is a “huge market and opportunity.”

In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.”

“I think there’s a type of inquiry that we’re particularly good at — I think we’re the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer is actually multiple perspectives from a lot of people,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said.

Meanwhile, traditional search is similar to navigation – it is a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit on Reddit. But he said LLMs can be just as good at this, if not better. “So that’s the direction we’re going in.”

The CEO also noted that the number of weekly active search users over the past year has increased by 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the number of weekly active users of Reddit’s AI-powered answers rose from 1 million in Q1 2025 to 15 million by Q4.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential as well,” Hoffman added.

Reddit said it’s working on updating the AI’s answer interface by making its responses more media-rich, and beta trials of this have already begun.

The company is also thinking about how to position itself when it’s not just a social site, but a place where people come to get answers. Reddit told investors during the call that it will do away with the distinction between logged in and logged out users starting in the third quarter of 2026, as it will aim to personalize the site — using artificial intelligence and machine learning — and make it relevant to whoever shows up.

The company announced in 2025 that it plans to integrate its AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and AI feature. It has also released five new language Reddit Answers and is experimenting with dynamic operators alongside search results that include “extratext media.”

Although Reddit sees value in AI’s answers, it doesn’t keep that to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their own AI models on its data, is also growing. This business revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenue (i.e. non-advertising revenue). This “other” revenue increased 8% year-over-year to $36 million in the fourth quarter and rose 22% to $140 million for 2025.