Reddit's login push, earnings and Google AI Mode traffic

The story so far

Written automatically from the Oesnada stories in this timeline. Every number is checked against them. The numbers in brackets link to those stories.

Timeline

1. Also on our radar29 October 2026Reddit CEO Says Google's AI Mode "Does Not Drive TrafficThe Verge

   Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on the company's earnings call that Google's AI-powered search features do not send visitors to the platform. "The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic," he said. Reddit reported that search referrals in October fell by more than 1 million per week on average, and Huffman attributed part of the decline to how AI Mode and AI Overviews, Google's AI-generated search features, change the search experience. Huffman described this as a fundamental shift in how Google works, saying those features have evolved a lot and now, at a minimum, push everyone further down the search page. He also said Reddit believes its machine-translated content in other languages is being ranked lower, which he said would mainly affect the company outside the US. Even so, he said Reddit remains a top search term on Google, and that the drop reflects Google sending fewer people to Reddit rather than weaker consumer demand. He added that Google is crawling Reddit's pages as heavily as ever, so demand looks unchanged from Google's side too. The pressure runs in more than one direction: Google said a day earlier that it is seeing lower monetization, meaning less ad revenue, from ads in AI Mode, though it is expanding AI ads to more countries. To offset the search referral problem, Reddit says it is working to make the platform a direct, sticky, daily destination, meaning a place people visit regularly without going through a search engine.

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2. 29 October 2026CNBC

   Reddit Q3 Revenue Rises 53% to $895M, Beats Estimates; Shares Fall 9% After

   Reddit reported third-quarter revenue of $895 million, up 53% from a year earlier and ahead of the $878 million analysts expected, according to LSEG estimates.

3. Also on our radar29 October 2026Reddit to Require Login for All UsersThe Verge

   Reddit plans to require everyone to log in to view its content, ending the ability to browse the site without an account. CEO Steve Huffman said the company will first test the requirement in select markets outside the US over the coming months. There is no firm timeline for a wider rollout, and it is not yet clear how the site will behave for logged-out visitors, including people who open a shared link to a thread. The change targets a long-running problem. Reddit's openness has made it a frequent target for scraping and automated traffic, and the company has sued over alleged unauthorized access to its data and has also limited access to "Old Reddit." Huffman said the vast majority of unauthorized access happens through logged-out experiences, and he argued that a login requirement is better for the user experience and the ads business and is more protective of Reddit data. That matters for the many people who rely on Reddit, often by adding "reddit" to a search, to find answers written by real people. Reddit says it will study the effect on user experience, its business, and the wider Reddit ecosystem before deciding where the right boundaries lie. The company has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the incognito mode in its app. Reddit will continue to strike data licensing deals with companies, like the ones it signed with OpenAI and Google in 2024.

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Oesnada, "Reddit's login push, earnings and Google AI Mode traffic", https://oesnada.com/storylines/reddit-login-requirement-and-q3-earnings, accessed 30 October 2026.