Reddit has found that trafficking in human-authored content pays well in the AI era.<\/p>\n
And the popular internet community website sees an opportunity to make inroads in the search business, even as web search is being swallowed by generative AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n Company shares surged this week after Reddit reported<\/a> $500 million in revenue for Q2 2025, a 78 percent increase. Net income reached $89 million, a welcome turnaround from a $10 million loss during Q2 2024.<\/p>\n CEO Steve Huffman said in a statement, “Reddit is built for this moment. In a world where connection is increasingly rare, our communities show how valuable human conversation and knowledge really are.”<\/p>\n Reddit’s fortunes in part can be attributed to demand from AI firms for the community site’s historically human-authored posts, which they use for model training. The company’s data licensing business, part of its “other revenue” line item, reached $35 million, up 24 percent year-over-year. Reddit last year struck content partnerships with OpenAI<\/a> and Google<\/a>. And in June this year, it sued Anthropic<\/a> to halt uncompensated content scraping.<\/p>\n Huffman, during the company’s conference call for investors, acknowledged the value of content licensing along with its limits. “What we’ve learned since we did those deals is that the Reddit Corpus is not essential, but appears to be growing in importance to some of the largest players on the Internet,” he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Huffman expects Reddit will continue to learn how to structure its partnerships while also striving to build the best possible products on top of the Reddit Corpus \u2013 the company’s content dataset.<\/p>\n In a letter to investors<\/a> [PDF], Huffman emphasized the need to tend the company’s core product through initiatives to preserve human authenticity \u2013 the company is struggling to block AI spam posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Beyond that, Reddit sees search as an opportunity, as do many other firms that expect Google to soon face a judicial order to divest Chrome as an antitrust remedy.<\/p>\n According to Huffman, Reddit is becoming a search destination by virtue of the breadth of discussions.<\/p>\n “Every week, hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit looking for advice, and we\u2019re turning more of that intent into active users of Reddit\u2019s native search,” he told investors in his letter. “We\u2019re seeing good traction here as our core search product now has 70 million weekly users and Reddit Answers has grown to 6 million, up from 1 million last quarter.”<\/p>\n Reddit Answers<\/a> is an answer to other AI firms using Reddit content without referring searchers back to Reddit: “It leverages generative AI to help find, synthesize, and deliver easy to understand answers from real posts and comments from redditors,” the Reddit Answers Help Site explains<\/a>.<\/p>\n In other words, Reddit Answers uses AI to surface its community-generated content in response to a search query, rather than presenting a list of search results links. And it links back internally to the source Reddit posts.<\/p>\n Reddit isn’t taking on Google directly by trying to index the entire web. But it doesn’t need to because Google’s ineffective policing of web spam and AI slop<\/a> has made Google Search less appealing<\/a>. For the past few years, savvy internet users have suggested<\/a> appending the term “reddit” to Google Search queries as a way of improving the results.<\/p>\n And the proliferation of AI content online isn’t helping. As researchers recently noted<\/a>, up to 24 percent of the text in corporate press releases and 14 percent of UN press releases as of late 2024 appear to have been generated by LLMs. The result on Reddit is people asking<\/a>, “Is anybody else absolutely SICK of seeing AI slop everywhere?”<\/p>\n If Reddit can keep the AI scrapers and spambots at bay through its human verification initiative and preserve its predominantly human character, the community site is likely to continue growing as people seek out authentic human-crafted content. As Huffman observed during the earnings call, “Reddit is one of the most searched for terms on Google because users around the internet go to Google with the intention of ending up on Reddit.” \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reddit has found that trafficking in human-authored content pays well in the AI era. 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