Reddit Google AI Mode Traffic: 1 Million Fewer Visits a Week

Reddit reported a very good quarter on Thursday, October 29. Revenue rose 53% to $895 million and net income reached $283 million, according to the company’s shareholder letter. The stock still fell about 30% the next day. The reason sits in a single sentence on page 5 of that letter.

“During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.”

That is Reddit’s own wording. A referral is a visit that starts on a search results page and ends on Reddit, and the company says it lost more than a million of them every week, on average, for the month of October.

Big number. Small sentence.

What the letter says about the drop

Reddit’s letter says search referral traffic was “down meaningfully” in the third quarter and that the decline sped up late in the quarter. Logged-out and web visitors took the biggest hit, per the letter. The letter adds that some of the damage reaches logged-in users and the app too, because search is a common way people come back.

Then comes the forecast. If the October rate continues, the letter says, total daily active users “could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage” from a base of 130 million. Reddit gave no exact figure, and the letter doesn’t say how likely that outcome is.

CEO Steve Huffman named the cause on the earnings call. According to The Verge, he said: “The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know.” Search Engine Journal reports that he called Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode the biggest part of Reddit’s working hypothesis, and that he pointed to a second factor as well: Reddit believes its machine-translated pages are being ranked lower, which mostly affects traffic outside the US.

Huffman also said Google is “crawling us as hard as ever.” So Reddit’s argument is that demand is intact and Google is simply sending fewer people over.

The numbers side by side

Item	Figure	Who reported it
Q3 revenue	$895 million, up 53%	Reddit shareholder letter
Q3 net income	$283 million	Reddit shareholder letter
Daily active uniques	130.3 million, up 12%	Reddit shareholder letter
US daily active uniques	50.7 million, down 2%	Yahoo Finance
Q4 revenue guidance	$1,000M to $1,030M	Reddit shareholder letter
Stock move on October 30	Down 30.44% to $90.15	Yahoo Finance
Stock move after hours on October 29	Down 18%	Reuters, via Quartz

Yahoo Finance reports that analysts expected roughly 134 million daily users, so the 130.3 million figure missed, and that the revenue forecast for the current quarter came in weaker than expected. The letter lists the guidance range but not the analyst consensus, so I can’t check the second claim against a primary source. I’d treat the miss on users as reported by Yahoo, not confirmed by Reddit.

Why the US number matters

Reddit’s total user count grew 12%, but that growth came from abroad. International users rose 24% while US users fell 2%, per Yahoo Finance. Reuters, via Quartz, says the US dip is the first decline since Reddit went public in 2024.

My read: one quarter of data can’t prove that AI Mode caused the US decline. Reddit offers a hypothesis, backed by its own referral counts, and Google hasn’t answered it in public. Still, the timing fits what Alphabet told investors the same week. In our post on Alphabet’s worst day, Google’s chief business officer said AI Mode ads monetize at a lower rate than regular search. If Google earns less per AI Mode answer and sends less traffic out, the pressure lands on publishers first.

Reddit plans to shift toward a “logged-in-only experience.” Testing starts in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter, according to the letter. Huffman gave three reasons: a better personalized experience, more signals for ad targeting, and protection of what he calls “Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data.”

According to The Next Web, Huffman said the “vast majority” of scraping happens through logged-out browsing. Reddit hasn’t decided how much stays open. In a post on Reddit, Huffman said the front page should remain visible without an account, and that people arriving from search or a shared link should still see the thread they came for. That post sat at 0 upvotes with about 200 comments late Thursday, per the same report.

There’s a tension in the plan that the letter doesn’t resolve. A site that depends on search visitors is about to put a wall in front of search visitors. Reddit says logged-in and app users make up over 80% of its monetization, and My read: it may be making a rational bet that the logged-out crowd matters less than it looks. Whether the test markets prove that is something to watch when Reddit reports fourth-quarter results.

It also ties into the fight over who gets to use web content for AI. A day after Reddit’s call, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft agreed to honor a shared robots.txt signal, which we covered in the AI training opt-out post. A login wall is a blunter tool for the same worry.

My read

I don’t know if Huffman is right that Google’s AI features are the main cause, and neither does anyone outside Reddit and Google. What stands out is that a public company put a weekly number on the problem. Plenty of publishers have complained about AI search in general terms. Reddit gave investors a figure, and investors priced it in one day.

If you run any site that gets most of its visitors from Google, the practical question isn’t whether Reddit is special. It’s whether your own referral count has started to slide, and Search Console will show you that faster than any earnings call.

Note on sources

Figures marked “Reddit shareholder letter” come from the Q3 2026 letter filed with the SEC, which I read directly. The Verge and Search Engine Journal quotes come from the articles’ published text as returned by search; I read The Next Web and Yahoo Finance pages directly. The Reuters after-hours figure comes through Quartz’s summary of Reuters.

Reddit says Google sends it 1 million fewer visits a week. Its stock fell 30% anyway.

What the letter says about the drop

The numbers side by side

Why the US number matters

My read

Note on sources

Sources

What the letter says about the drop

The numbers side by side

Why the US number matters

Reddit’s response: a login wall

My read

Note on sources

Sources