Reddit search referrals drop by more than 1 million a week

Reddit told shareholders on Thursday 29 October (US time) that its search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average during October, and its chief executive named Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode as the main suspect.

The figure sits in Reddit's third-quarter letter, released with its earnings call. The letter says search referral traffic was "down meaningfully" in the quarter, that the decline sped up late in the quarter, and that it carried on into October.

Reddit's Q3 letter gives no referral baseline

The letter puts it this way: "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week." It goes on to warn that if the rate continues, total daily active uniques could fall in the fourth quarter by a low double-digit percentage from a base of 130 million.

Two things are missing. Reddit did not say how many weekly referrals the 1 million is measured against, so the percentage drop is unknown. And it did not split the decline by search engine, although Google is the engine its CEO discussed on the call.

The audience numbers fill in some of the picture. Globally, Reddit had 130.3 million daily active uniques in the third quarter, level with the second. The US figure slipped to 50.7 million from 53.2 million, and the fall came entirely from logged-out users, who dropped from 30.1 million to 27.3 million. Logged-in US users edged up from 23.1 million to 23.4 million.

Three months earlier, Reddit's second-quarter letter had only described search referrals as "choppy". Outside the US, daily active uniques grew 24% year on year, and chief operating officer Jen Wong said the company has been spending more on marketing outside the US, partly to offset the audience it lost from search.

Huffman says AI Mode drives no traffic

Asked what was driving the change, chief executive Steve Huffman gave a two-part hypothesis. The larger part is AI Overviews and AI Mode. In his view Google is rolling both out hard in the US and other markets, and at the very least they shove the other results lower on the page.

The smaller part is machine-translated content, which Reddit believes Google is now ranking lower. That mainly affects traffic outside the US. Huffman said this does not look like the kind of algorithm change that comes and goes, while admitting Reddit has no direct visibility into Google's systems. Neither the letter nor the call said how much of the loss belongs to each cause.

Huffman was blunt about AI Mode. He said it "does not drive traffic", for Reddit or, as far as he knows, for anyone else. He also said demand for Reddit itself has not changed. The word Reddit remains among the most-searched terms on Google, and "Google is crawling us as hard as ever."

A site can be crawled constantly, rank as well as ever and still lose clicks, because the clicks are being absorbed higher up the page. Our plain-English guide to zero-click search covers how that works and how to spot it in Search Console.

Google's Q3 results give no clicks figure

Google's own third-quarter results, announced on 28 October, read very differently. Alphabet's Search and Other revenue rose 12% year on year to US$63.35 billion, and chief executive Sundar Pichai said the year-on-year query growth rate is the highest it has been in five years.

Google did not supply a traffic number. In the second quarter Pichai said Google was sending "billions of clicks to websites every week" through its AI features. The third-quarter remarks and call contained no clicks figure at all. In a post accompanying an Ads Decoded episode released on 28 October, Google search executive Shivani Mohan also cited billions of website clicks, again with no period attached and nothing to compare it against.

Google says questions in AI Mode run about three times longer than traditional searches, and Pichai said on 28 October that one in five AI Mode searches globally use voice, images or documents rather than typed text alone. Mohan said people appreciate the clarity of AI summaries yet still want the detail and lived experience of the open web, which is close to Reddit's whole proposition.

Google is also now selling against that behaviour. Its 28 October advertising announcement said Google is now scaling ads in AI Mode in Australia, and its help page says existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible by default. So the surface Reddit says sends it no traffic is a surface Australian advertisers are already paying to appear on.

Treat Shepard's 0.9% AI click rate cautiously

One small experiment gives a rough sense of what an AI citation is worth in clicks. Cyrus Shepard used Google's opt-out controls to remove one site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, then compared its impressions, clicks and click-through rate before, during and after.

His estimate was that impressions in AI features carried a click-through rate of about 0.9%, and that those impressions made up about 8% of the site's total. The more surprising finding was that ordinary organic clicks also fell while the site was excluded, even though AI Overviews still appeared on the results pages. His reading was that appearing in the AI summary lifts clicks elsewhere on the same page. Near Media has described a similar brand-lift effect in its own research, seen many times though not consistently.

It is one site and a small case study, so treat it as a data point rather than a benchmark. It also cannot show how many clicks an AI Overview takes from the links below it, because the summaries appeared on the page throughout the test. What it does suggest is that a citation inside an AI answer earns few clicks on its own, and that being cited may still help a site's other listings on the same page.

Logged-in users drive over 80% of monetisation

Reddit's response is to put more of the site behind a login. According to the letter, Reddit will start a full test this quarter of a version of the site that only works for logged-in users, in some markets outside the US. It has not named the markets, so Australia is neither confirmed nor ruled out.

Huffman said part of the test is deciding how much of a page someone can see before a login prompt, including someone arriving from search. He said shared links should keep working and some version of Reddit will remain visible before a hard prompt. He also said, "This is a test, but we are going to make this transition," and that Reddit will likely trade reach for engagement.

Logged-in and app users account for more than 80% of Reddit's monetisation, according to the letter. Third-quarter revenue grew 53% year on year to US$895 million, and the company says the vast majority of scraping happens through logged-out access. Reddit also said it is in active talks with Google and OpenAI about data licensing, has nothing to announce, and that not doing a deal is one possible outcome.

For a business that picks up leads or mentions through Reddit discussions, the practical risk is that a prospect in a test market clicks through from Google and meets a login prompt part way through the page. Wong also said the company is "pretty skeptical of GEO" and does not sell generative engine optimisation as part of its advertiser partnerships.

Are AI Overviews cutting my organic clicks?

Reddit's loss is extreme because so much of its traffic was logged-out search visitors. A smaller site will not see numbers like these, but it can see the same pattern if it looks past rank, because a rankings report can look stable while clicks slide.

• In Search Console, compare clicks and impressions by page for October against the same weeks last year. A page with flat impressions and a falling click-through rate is the signature of an AI summary taking the answer.
• In GA4, split organic sessions by landing page and by new versus returning users. Reddit's loss was concentrated in logged-out visitors, and the equivalent for most sites is new users on informational pages.
• Report brand search on its own. Reddit's point that demand is intact while clicks fall only shows up if brand queries are separated from the rest.
• Note any referral traffic that arrives through Reddit, forums or other third-party platforms, and budget as if it could halve. Those platforms are changing their access rules for their own reasons.

Our earlier look at AI assistant traffic found ChatGPT and similar tools sending under 3% of organic volume over 12 months across 195 sites, so gains from AI referrals are not yet filling the hole that AI summaries open. Until Google publishes click data for AI Overviews and AI Mode, your own Search Console and GA4 trends are the only numbers worth planning next year's SEO and content spend on.