On November 10, 2026, Reddit unveiled Reddit Reviews, product review pages that the discussion site builds from users’ comments using artificial intelligence (AI). Brands can’t pay to be included, and they can’t remove negative reviews.
The feature is a test for now. It covers about 10,000 products and is open only to users in the United States. Reddit plans to expand it to other countries in 2027.
A week earlier, on November 3, Reddit started a second, separate test: ads on the results pages of its own search tool. Both announcements came after Reddit’s October 29 quarterly earnings report, which flagged a drop in traffic from search engines.
Review pages built from Reddit conversations
Reddit Reviews “organizes product conversations from across Reddit into dedicated reviews,” Reddit said in the announcement posted on its corporate site. Readers reach a review page from Reddit’s search bar, or by selecting a product name highlighted in a comment.
Each page opens with a “What people are saying” box that summarizes the reviews. A bar shows how the conversations break down into positive, mixed and negative. The most frequent points are grouped into themes. In Reddit’s example of an espresso machine, the themes could include how easy the machine is for a beginner and how much counter space it takes up.
Readers can then browse all the comments, filter them by topic and jump to the original discussion. The page also lists the products people most often compare with the one they are viewing. Separate category pages group products by shopping need, such as budget picks.
The test covers four product categories: electronics, health and beauty, home and garden, and fashion. Reddit says it will roll the feature out to US users “over the next few weeks,” in its iOS and Android apps and on the web.
Reddit had already been testing an earlier version with US users since February, according to TechCrunch, a US tech news site. That test started with electronics, video games, and health and beauty. In September, it added two more categories: home and garden, and fashion.
How the AI picks comments
Reddit’s Help Center, its online support site, explains the method on a page updated November 10. The sorting relies on large language models, the AI programs that analyze and generate text. The models look for comments that appear to describe a personal experience with a product.
The models then classify those comments as positive, negative or mixed, following rules set in advance. They don’t write or rewrite the comments, which stay in the users’ own words.
To qualify, a comment must be less than a year old and safe for work, meaning not explicit. It also can’t come from an adults-only community; on Reddit, a community is a forum devoted to one topic. The pages draw only on English-language conversations from US users.
Reddit doesn’t check whether the author actually bought or used the product. A first impression, or trying the product in a store, can be enough. A bare question doesn’t count, and neither do speculation, secondhand accounts or listings of items for sale.
For now, users can’t keep their comments off review pages, and they can’t turn Reddit Reviews off. They can report an inaccurate summary in r/bugs, the Reddit community for reporting problems with the site.
The Help Center itself warns that summaries may reflect only some of the conversations, and that the AI can miss context or make mistakes.
Little control for brands and retailers
The Help Center is explicit: a merchant can’t pay to get a product included or to have negative opinions removed. Reddit’s help page for advertisers adds that a product can’t be taken out of Reddit Reviews. It also says Reddit currently offers no sponsored, or paid, placement on the pages.
Brands have one lever: their product catalog, the file that lists their products, prices and links to buy them. When a brand supplies one, the page can show an image, a price and “Where to buy” links. Reddit accepts only catalogs priced in US dollars. Shoppers complete the purchase on the merchant’s site, and Reddit takes no commission.
A brand that wants to know whether its products appear on review pages contacts its representative at Reddit Ads, Reddit’s advertising business. Brands without a representative fill out a form. Participation isn’t guaranteed. A catalog adds information to an existing page but can’t create a new one, and taking part doesn’t require buying ads.
Brands can also ask their representative for reports on page views and clicks. A brand that spots a mistake by the AI reports it to the same representative.
Google has taken a different approach with reviews in its ads. As we reported, its AI summarizes customer reviews in those ads and keeps only the positive ones, and advertisers can’t edit the text. Reddit’s pages show negative opinions as well.
A separate test: ads in Reddit’s search results
The second test, announced on November 3, is separate from Reddit Reviews. It puts ads on the results pages of Reddit’s own search tool, which people use to look through the site’s discussions. Reddit says those pages show “high purchase and search intent,” meaning the people on them are actively looking for something and likely to buy.
Several factors decide whether an ad appears, including how relevant it is to the words typed into the search bar. Reddit gives an example: a search for an “espresso station” could bring up ads for espresso machines, coffee beans or mugs.
Only “a select group of eligible advertisers” is taking part. PPC Land, a news site that covers online advertising, points out that Reddit hasn’t named the countries involved, the ad format or how the ads are priced. On Google, advertisers can bid on keywords so their ads show up on the searches they choose. PPC Land notes that Reddit’s post says nothing about bidding on keywords.
Falling traffic from search engines
In its October 29 letter to shareholders, Reddit wrote that its search referral traffic was “down meaningfully” in the third quarter (July through September). That is the traffic search engines send to the site. The decline sped up late in the quarter. In October, that traffic dropped by more than 1 million visits a week on average.
Reddit currently has about 130 million unique visitors a day, counting both logged-in and logged-out users. The company warns that if the decline continues at this pace, that number could fall by “a low-double-digit percentage” in the fourth quarter (October through December). That means a drop of roughly 10% or a bit more.
Reddit also plans to make most of the site available only to logged-in users, starting with tests in some countries outside the US.
The risks and unknowns of Reddit Reviews
According to TechCrunch, the review pages could bring people straight to Reddit to compare products. TechCrunch also points to the risk of “astroturfing,” when a brand fakes support and passes it off as genuine opinion. In TechCrunch’s view, the pages could become a bigger target for that kind of fake review. Reddit’s announcement lists three safeguards: volunteer moderators, its Safety team and user voting.
The sources don’t agree on how many US users have the feature. Reddit’s announcement describes a rollout to US users “over the next few weeks.” TechCrunch says “all U.S. users.” The help page for advertisers says only “a subset of US users.”
The announcement also claims that “half of U.S. shoppers say they come to Reddit to validate AI recommendations.” According to PPC Land, the figure comes from a survey Reddit commissioned itself. PPC Land also notes that the images in the announcement look like mock-ups, meaning sample designs. The images show how many comments are cited, and those counts don’t match from one image to the next.
Reddit also hasn’t said whether the pages will be visible without logging in. Nor has it said whether Google and other search engines will be able to index them, that is, list them in their search results. There is no date for France or Belgium, and none for including conversations in French.
What it means
Reddit is turning its search into a shopping guide. It launched two tests a week apart: ads in its search results, and review pages assembled by AI. Both target the same moment, when people compare products before they buy.
Reddit itself doesn’t link these tests to its drop in traffic from search engines. PPC Land draws the connection anyway: with fewer visitors sent by Google, Reddit has a reason to keep the people who already search on its site.
Brands have no say over what appears on the pages: they can’t pay to be included, and they can’t remove a product or a negative review. Their only tool is the catalog, which adds a price and a purchase link to an existing page.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, already runs something similar: Facebook Answers, pages its AI writes from public posts. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, took the opposite approach with the business profiles it opened in ChatGPT on November 10. There, a verified business can correct its own information.
For now, the review pages have no effect in France or Belgium, because they draw only on English-language conversations from US users. A European brand that sells in the US could already have a page, though. Its products would need to fall into one of the four categories and be discussed often in English by US users.
Four questions remain open: which countries are added in 2027, whether other languages are included, whether Google indexes the pages, and whether ads eventually appear on the review pages themselves. On that last point, Reddit says only that it “currently does not offer sponsored placement.”
Sources
- Introducing Reddit Reviews, Reddit, November 10, 2026
- What is Reddit Reviews?, Reddit Help Center, updated November 10, 2026
- Reddit Reviews, Reddit Ads Help, accessed November 13, 2026
- We Are Testing Ad Placements in Reddit Search Pages, Reddit, November 3, 2026
- Letter to shareholders Q3 2026, Reddit (SEC), October 29, 2026
- Reddit is turning user conversations into AI-powered product reviews, TechCrunch, November 10, 2026
- Reddit tests AI review pages for 10,000 products built from user threads, PPC Land, November 11, 2026
- Reddit tests ads in its search results for the first time, PPC Land, November 3, 2026
Header image: MACCUS diagram, data from Reddit and TechCrunch (November 2026)
