AI on the Horizon: Reddit's Bold Move to Transform Your Search Journey!
Reddit is moving to enhance its features with AI designed to optimize users' search experiences.
Online forum site, Reddit, plans to launch significant upgrades to boost search experience in 2025. According to its CEO, Steve Huffman, "the upgrade is designed to help users navigate the social network and be able to answer subjective hard, [and] interesting questions.”
Reddit Answers
Reddit plans to achieve these plans by integrating Reddit Answers, a feature that allows visitors to ask questions and receive curated summaries of relevant responses and threads from across its platform into its existing search. “[In Reddit] conversations, for 20 years, our users have left this massive corpus of information, so we’re starting to unlock that with Answers,” Huffman stated at Reddit’s Q4 2024 earnings call. “We’ll continue to iterate on this product.”
Reddit CFO Drew Vollero agreed and added that the company is recruiting engineers to build a “small search team” focused on these capabilities. The company sees the potential in AI and has embraced the technology to grow bigger. Last year, the online forum brought AI-powered translation to dozens of new territories, and there's more planned for this year.
Also, Reddit rolled out AI-powered insights for brands. It began testing AI-powered search results pages, which summarize and recommend content across different Reddit communities.
Room for Improvement
Reddit's move may be down to investors' disappointment in its fiscal Q4 results, which were impacted in part by changes to Google’s search algorithm. This saw the daily active unique users on Reddit go up 39% year-over-year to 101.7 million users, missing investors’ estimates of 103.1 million uniques.
Huffman further hinted at making Reddit search a part of the platform onboarding process aimed at driving growth, retention, and ultimately revenue. “I think helping the user be able to search directly on Reddit, refine their queries on Reddit, eventually come directly to Reddit for those types of queries, and even integrating search into something like onboarding over time — I think [these are] really interesting things,” he said. “It’s amazing for us to pick up on that signal … and of course, that signal [has] incredible monetization potential.”
