Reddit wants to become a search engine

In a letter to investors, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman talks about turning Reddit into a "go-to search engine". The company is aware of the value of its content and community. Especially in times of AI slop, fake news and AI answers of uncertain origin, people's contributions to the platform are all the more valuable.

The contributions have already earned Reddit lucrative contracts with AI companies such as OpenAI and Google. Both have licensed content from the platform for their AI training. However, Reddit now wants to improve search on its own service. According to Huffman, one of the "most pressing needs" is to make Reddit the search engine of choice. Hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit every week looking for advice. The aim is to help them.

Reddit relies on human contributions

The search function within the platform has around 70 million active users per week. Around 416 million people are active on the entire platform per week, 108 million per day. Reddit Answers, the platform's previous AI search, already has more than 6 million users per week. This function is now to be better anchored in the existing search.

Reddit is also likely to be affected by the fact that Google uses AI Overview and AI Mode to process content from other platforms via AI and pass it on directly to searchers. It is often no longer necessary to click on a website if an AI summary on Google already contains the answer to a searched question. This means that Reddit can also earn less money from advertising, as fewer people come to the platform via Google.

Dager is now trying to turn Reddit's own search into a kind of competition so that content can be found more easily via Reddit directly. Reddit sees its own advantage in the contributions of the community, which have not yet been exposed to an AI slop. This refers to an AI flood of SEO-friendly posts that influence Google's search results, as well as AI content that is posted on social networks in order to participate in monetization programs or steer political discourse, for example.

According to Reddit, however, there is already a trend for people to include the word Reddit in a Google search query in order to find posts explicitly written by humans. At the OMR Festival in Hamburg, Jen Wong, Chief Operating Officer of Reddit, said: You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence." AI only has opinions that come from humans. Only if people have rated a car seat for children can AI reflect that. "AI hasn't experienced anything itself." People on Reddit write what they have experienced.

In addition to improved search, Reddit also wants to offer a better advertising environment for advertisers. In the letter, Huffman also reports on his trip to Cannes, where he met advertisers, which was "a good barometer of how brands see Reddit". "They want to work with us, they understand our exceptional role on the internet and they recognize that we can offer them real value." According to the latest quarterly figures, advertising revenue amounted to 465 million US dollars –, an increase of 84 percent year-on-year. Other income amounted to 35 million US dollars – This should include license agreements.

(emw)