Reddit is restructuring its core product strategy around artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on AI-enhanced search as both a user-experience upgrade and a revenue driver.

On a recent earnings call, company leadership identified AI-powered search as a central pillar of Reddit’s future roadmap. The platform is integrating its existing search infrastructure with Reddit Answers, an AI system that uses large language models to generate conversational responses based on Reddit’s historical posts and comments.

According to CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit is targeting queries that do not have a single definitive answer but instead benefit from aggregated perspectives, experiences, and edge cases. In this framing, Reddit’s value lies in the breadth and diversity of its community-generated content, which can be synthesized into multi-faceted responses rather than binary or purely factual outputs.

Historically, Reddit’s search function has been primarily navigational, helping users locate subreddits or specific threads. The updated approach adds a generative layer on top of the existing index, enabling natural-language queries and returning synthesized answers that link back to source discussions. Huffman has indicated that large language models can match or exceed traditional search performance for these exploratory, discussion-oriented queries, and Reddit plans to emphasize this capability.

Usage metrics reported by the company indicate early traction. Weekly active search users increased from 60 million to 80 million year over year. Reddit Answers grew from approximately 1 million to 15 million weekly users over the same period. The company is testing expanded answer formats that include images and other media, extending Reddit Answers to more languages, and piloting dynamic agents designed to assist with more complex, multi-step queries.

Reddit is also revising its approach to user segmentation. It aims to reduce the functional distinction between logged-in and logged-out visitors by applying AI and machine learning to personalize content recommendations for all site visitors, regardless of account status.

In parallel, Reddit’s data has become a monetizable asset in the external AI ecosystem. The company’s content licensing business, which allows third parties to use Reddit discussions for training AI models, has grown into a significant component of its non-advertising revenue. This development reinforces the role of AI, not only as a product feature but as a foundational element of Reddit’s long-term business model.