Reddit wants to be a search engine now

Reddit knows that it has valuable data from actual people — it’s already reached deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share its data with them. But Reddit is also investing in improving its own search capabilities, and in its latest note to investors, CEO Steve Huffman says that the company is “concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs,” including “making Reddit a go-to search engine.”

Huffman says that “every week, hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit looking for advice, and we’re turning more of that intent into active users of Reddit’s native search.” Reddit’s core search has more than 70 million weekly active unique users — Reddit overall averages 416.4 million weekly active unique users — and Reddit Answers, the platform’s AI search tool that it launched in December, has 6 million weekly users, up from 1 million weekly users in the first quarter of this year.

To continue to build out search, Reddit is “expanding Reddit Answers globally, integrating it more deeply into the core search experience, and making search a central feature across Reddit,” Huffman says.

Of course, the move to build out its own search capabilities could be a hedge against losing traffic from Google, which is increasingly finding new ways to give you answers with AI instead of providing a list of links. Appending the word “Reddit” to Google searches is a classic way to try and get information written by humans, and Reddit has seen an influx of traffic as a result. But if Google becomes a less reliable source of traffic for Reddit, the platform may need to have better search for itself.

Reddit turned 20 last month, and the company is going big on AI. (In an interview at the time, CTO Chris Slowe told The Verge that the initial rollout of Reddit Answers is “going really well.”) “The internet is evolving, and our role as a community-powered platform for human connection is only becoming more critical,” Huffman says.