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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer\n <\/p>\n
For years now, Reddit has inhabited a strange and unique position on the internet. As the largest collection of forums left on the web, the 20-year-old platform has enjoyed a lot of recent growth. While the rest of the web has become spammier, more automated, and locked down, Reddit has also become an important natural resource to search engines like Google, which have sent people there by the billion. At the same time, Reddit has served as a crucial source of both training data and fetchable links for AI companies, including Google.<\/p>\n
For Reddit, this position was tolerable for a couple of reasons. One is that the collapse of the rest of the web, and Google\u2019s just-send-them-to-Reddit solution for this problem, resulted in a long stretch of enormous growth for the platform, and at just the right time (Reddit went public in early 2024). Another reason is that the company was getting paid directly by both OpenAI and Google. (It is currently suing Anthropic.) In 2025, Reddit acknowledged some tension in its situation. \u201cWe get a ton of traffic from Google today,\u201d CEO Steve Huffman told<\/a> me last year. \u201cWe know that\u2019s not forever.\u201d Still, he said, \u201cthe core of Reddit actually becomes more valuable over time when the rest of the internet turns into AI.\u201d<\/p>\n This month, despite a strong quarterly earnings report, shareholders questioned that theory. Revenue was up, the company was more profitable than ever, and future guidance was ambitious. But the stock tanked, in part due to disclosures<\/a> about the company\u2019s dynamic with Google. \u201cSearch referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter,\u201d Huffman said in his letter to investors. \u201cWhile our visibility in referral traffic remains low, we\u2019re not building for drive-by traffic \u2026 People will always want to hear from other people: real opinions, expertise, stories, and communities where they can ask, learn, argue, and belong.\u201d A couple of weeks earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit, alongside other publishers, had been reconsidering<\/a> its relationship with Google.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to understand why. Increases in search traffic, as Huffman had suggested last year, couldn\u2019t go on forever \u2014\u00a0Reddit\u2019s explosive growth in 2024 and 2025 always had this asterisk, and the people casually encountering Reddit posts in Google results tended not to stick around to contribute to the site. But as any Google user can attest, the prominence of Reddit links has also been overshadowed by even more prominent AI Overviews, which often summarize Reddit content, citing it as a footnote but giving searchers little reason to click through to the source. It\u2019s always been dangerous for publishers to depend on megaplatforms loaning their audiences, and over time, most of them \u2014\u00a0Facebook, X, and now Google \u2014 have evolved in ways that discourage users from leaving the core product. What\u2019s different this time, for Reddit and anyone else in Google\u2019s search index and AI-training data, is that \u201csearch\u201d has been turned into an automated summarization process. Google isn\u2019t just indexing Reddit or excerpting Reddit to answer prompts and queries. It\u2019s ripping it off, automatically and at scale.<\/p>\n In some ways, this makes Reddit more valuable than ever to Google, even as it\u2019s getting less out of their arrangement. At the very least, to borrow a term of art from the AI world, you could say that Google is distilling Reddit, and in the process upgrading its AI Overviews from semi-redundant alternative search results into to-the-point summaries of things people have written on the platform (or elsewhere). At the Verge, Mia Sato reports<\/a> on how marketers are trying to take advantage of this situation:<\/p>\n According to data compiled for The Verge by Semrush, an SEO company owned by Adobe, Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by AI tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google\u2019s Gemini and AI Mode \u2014 more than any news publisher, repositories of scholarly articles, and even Wikipedia. AI responses are also encroaching into the online shopping journey: Semrush also found that compared to a year ago, Google is inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into search queries with commercial intent, like when shoppers are doing research on products or comparing brands.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now, she reports, \u201ca whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI,\u201d descending on the site \u201cto try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n