Reddit blames Google AI Mode for losing 1M search referrals a week

Over a million search referrals a week were worth clicking before AI Mode started answering those queries directly. Reddit says that is what it just lost.

Reddit filed its Q3 2026 letter to shareholders on 29 October. The letter says search referral traffic was down meaningfully in the quarter. The decline sped up late in the period. On the 30 October earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman blamed Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The figures Reddit put on paper

The letter puts October this way. Search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. If the rate holds, total Daily Active Uniques could fall by a low-double-digit percentage in Q4. Reddit's current base is 130 million DAUqs.

U.S. daily uniques fell from 53.2 million in Q2 to 50.7 million in Q3. The decline was in logged-out users. Logged-out U.S. uniques went from 30.1 million to 27.3 million. Logged-in U.S. uniques rose, from 23.1 million to 23.4 million. International daily uniques grew 24% year over year.

Why Reddit points at AI Mode

Huffman said Reddit's hypothesis has two parts. The biggest is AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said Google is expanding them in the U.S. and elsewhere. At a minimum, he said, they push other results down the page. The second factor is machine-translated content. He said Reddit believes it is being ranked lower, mainly outside the U.S.

Huffman said demand for Reddit has not changed. "Reddit" is still among the most-searched words on Google, he said. Google is crawling the site as hard as ever, he added. He said AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for Reddit, and not for anyone else, as far as he knows.

The login test

Reddit will begin a logged-in-only test in select markets outside the U.S. this quarter. The letter and the call do not name the markets. Huffman said the test will decide one thing. How much of a thread a visitor from search can read before a login prompt. Shared links should keep working. "This is a test, but we are going to make this transition," he said.

Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said Reddit is pretty skeptical of GEO. She said Reddit is fairly resistant to manipulation. GEO is not part of Reddit's advertiser partnerships today, she said. Reddit's Q3 revenue grew 53% year over year to $895 million. Logged-in and app users produce over 80% of monetization, the letter says.

A site owner now has a first-party number for what AI Mode can take. Reddit is one site with large tail-query coverage. Its loss rate is not every site's rate. But the direction and the pace are now on the record, from a public company's filing.

Source

Reddit Q3 2026 Letter to Shareholders (SEC EX-99.2), as reported by Search Engine Journal.