What changed
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call that Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews do not drive traffic to Reddit. Reddit said search referrals in October fell by more than 1 million on average each week, with Huffman attributing part of the decline to Google’s changing search experience.
Why it matters
Google is still sending people to Reddit, but this account suggests the route is narrowing: users may get an AI-generated answer without clicking through to the site where the underlying discussion lives. For Reddit, that puts a direct pressure point on one of its major discovery channels and makes the value of being highly visible in search less straightforward.
That matters beyond one platform. Websites can appear in an answer while receiving fewer visits, which weakens the feedback loop between being found, building a returning audience and sustaining the work that produces searchable information. The practical question for companies that depend on search is no longer simply whether Google displays them. It is whether Google’s new interface gives people a reason to leave Google at all.
The scale of Google’s contribution to Reddit’s decline is not quantified, and it is not yet clear whether the drop is temporary or structural. If the pattern persists, search visibility may increasingly become a measure of inclusion in an answer rather than a reliable source of traffic.
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