Reddit said on Thursday, October 29, 2026, alongside its third-quarter results, that it will put most of the site behind a login. In his letter to shareholders, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote that the company will “begin fully testing this in select markets outside the U.S.” in the fourth quarter. The same letter put a number on the slide in search traffic: in October, it “dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.”
Huffman points first to Google’s AI-generated answers. The next day, Friday, October 30, Reddit’s stock fell 29.22%, its worst day since the company went public in 2024, according to CNBC.
A decline that sped up late in the quarter
According to the letter, search referral traffic “was down meaningfully” in the third quarter, “with the decline accelerating later in the quarter.” Logged-out and web traffic took the biggest hit. Some of the impact also reached logged-in and app users, since search is a common way they come back to the site.
Reddit averaged 130.3 million daily active uniques, its measure of daily visitors, in the third quarter, up 12% from a year earlier. That number fell 2% in the US, to 50.7 million, and rose 24% internationally, to 79.6 million. Of those, 76.8 million were logged out, or nearly six in ten.
Reddit warns that if October’s trend continues, total daily visitors could fall in the fourth quarter “by a low-double-digit percentage” from its base of 130 million. To offset part of the lost reach, the company increased its user marketing spend outside the US, chief operating officer Jen Wong said on the earnings call.
Google’s AI Mode takes the blame
Asked by Raymond James analyst Josh Beck about the traffic shift, Huffman said Reddit’s “hypothesis is twofold.” The biggest factor is Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, which Google appears to be expanding “quite aggressively both in the U.S. and outside,” he said. “What started as a feature is now the full search experience.” In his view, those answers push everything else further down the results page.
Later on the call, he was blunter: “The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody as far as I know.” He also noted that “Reddit” is still among the most searched words on Google and that “Google is crawling us as hard as ever.” A day earlier, Alphabet had acknowledged that AI Mode earns less than traditional search. In mid-October, Google moved links higher in AI Mode answers without saying how many clicks they send.
The second factor is machine-translated pages. Reddit believes Google now ranks them lower, and “this primarily would affect us outside the U.S.,” Huffman said. In 2024, France was the first country where Reddit launched its machine translation tool, which translates a user’s entire feed, including comments. In September 2024, the company announced an expansion to more than 35 countries and said it planned to bring that translated content to search engines, Engadget reported at the time.
Most of Reddit behind a login, with exceptions still undecided
In the letter, Huffman calls the move to a “primarily logged-in” Reddit a big change. He says it will improve personalization, give Reddit “more signals for ads targeting,” protect access to its “extremely valuable corpus of data,” and make it easier to adapt to emerging regulations. “Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition,” he wrote. “Reddit is the last platform to provide basically unfettered logged-out access, and that’s largely because of me. I’ve been holding that line,” Huffman said, according to CNBC.
Reddit has not named any country. On the call, Huffman said only that Reddit would test “in a few markets outside the U.S. as soon as we can.” He also said: “This is a test, but we are going to make this transition.”
How much of the site will stay open to logged-out readers has not been settled. In a post on Reddit quoted by 9to5Google and Next, Huffman wrote that “the front page being available logged-out is useful and important,” and that people arriving from search or an outside link should see the content they were sent to. Speaking to analysts, he said “there will be some version of Reddit accessible for those moments before we do that hard prompt,” and that Reddit still needs “to find the right boundary.” The app is getting a rebuilt incognito mode.
Huffman acknowledged the cost: “We will likely be trading reach for engagement.” He also said that “the vast majority of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out user base.”
The ad business
Logged-in and app users account for “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” according to the letter. Third-quarter revenue rose 53% to $895 million, including $847 million in advertising revenue, up 54%. Wong said click volume grew more than 50% year over year and conversion volume tripled. The number of active mid-market advertisers rose more than 50% from a year earlier, with gains in both North America and EMEA.
The letter also describes new lead-generation tools for Reddit Ads, the company’s ad platform: Reddit Max automated campaigns can now be used for lead generation, and businesses can route leads straight into their CRM, with a HubSpot integration in testing.
Citizens analyst Andrew Boone asked whether brands were coming to Reddit to get into the training data of large language models and show up in their answers. Wong said that “we’re pretty skeptical of GEO,” short for generative engine optimization, and called Reddit “pretty inoculated” against manipulation. It is “not a centerpiece” of Reddit’s work with advertisers, she added.
A Fudan University study posted on arXiv on October 8 found that eight of the ten AI search platforms it tested cited a made-up concept within seven days; Reddit was the domain most cited by Google’s AI and by Grok in that study. On Reddit itself, a practitioner in a digital marketing forum asked on October 30 what the login change would mean for brands that count on the platform to get cited by AI tools.
An unproven explanation
Reddit does not break down its decline by cause. Huffman calls it a hypothesis and says Reddit has no visibility into a possible Google algorithm change, which he considers unlikely. None of the sources reviewed for this article reports a response from Google. The possible fourth-quarter drop in visitors assumes October’s pace continues.
Reddit breaks out its audience only for the US and “International,” with no figures for France or Belgium. For the fourth quarter, it forecast revenue of $1 billion to $1.03 billion, short of the $1.05 billion analysts expected, according to CNBC. Asked about Reddit’s content licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, Huffman said the company is “in active discussions” and that any deal “has to be a fair exchange of value.” Engadget noted that the Google deal for AI training is reportedly worth about $60 million a year.
What it means
Since it launched 21 years ago, Reddit has been readable without an account, and many readers arrive from Google. The platform now says that flow is shrinking, and it plans to close part of its content to logged-out visitors. For brands, the change cuts both ways. Discussions that mention a product or a service provider could reach fewer casual readers, while Reddit says its ad business, built on logged-in users, will gain targeting data.
Two details make the announcement more relevant to French-speaking markets: the tests start outside the US, and Huffman believes Google now ranks Reddit’s machine-translated content lower (France was the first country to get the translation tool). There is no sign yet that France or Belgium will be among the first test markets. The link between Google’s AI and the decline is still Reddit’s own explanation, with no published data behind it. Wong’s skepticism about GEO is also the view of a company that sells advertising.
Open questions remain: which countries will test first, what a visitor arriving from Google will see before the login prompt, and how the data licensing talks end, including those covering the Google deal. Fourth-quarter results will also show whether the decline Reddit warned about materialized: the company said it will keep reporting logged-in and logged-out daily visitors by geography.
Sources
- Letter to Shareholders Q3 2026, Reddit, October 29, 2026
- Reddit (RDDT) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript, The Motley Fool, October 30, 2026
- Reddit stock plunges 29% after weak outlook, wrapping its worst day ever, CNBC, October 30, 2026
- Reddit will soon be a ‘logged-in-only’ website, forcing you to have an account, 9to5Google, October 29, 2026
- Reddit will force users to log in as AI is killing search traffic, Engadget, October 29, 2026
- Reddit is rolling out AI-powered translations to 35 countries, Engadget, September 25, 2024
- Reddit veut imposer la connexion pour protéger ses données et ses revenus, Next, October 30, 2026
Header image: MACCUS chart, data from Reddit (Q3 2026 letter to shareholders, October 29, 2026)
