Reddit stated on Thursday that its AI-driven search engine is poised to become the company's next significant opportunity—not only as a product but also as a revenue growth driver impacting profitability. During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, Reddit disclosed the latest progress in integrating traditional search with AI-powered search and hinted that, although the search business is not yet monetized, "this is a massive market and opportunity."

The company particularly believes that generative AI search performs better for most query scenarios.

"There is a category of search queries that I think we are particularly good at—perhaps even the best on the internet—which are questions that don't have a single correct answer, where the answer is actually a diverse set of opinions from many users," said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

He noted that traditional search functions more as a navigation tool to find the correct link to a topic or subreddit, a task that large language models can also handle, potentially even better. "That is the direction we are heading," he said.

The executive also mentioned that over the past year, weekly active users of Reddit search grew by 30%, increasing from 60 million to 80 million. Concurrently, weekly active users of the AI-powered Reddit Answers feature grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million in the fourth quarter.

"This part of the business has seen very significant growth, and I believe it also holds enormous potential," Huffman added.

Reddit stated it is upgrading the AI Answers interface by making responses more media-rich, with related pilots already underway.

The company is also rethinking its positioning: aiming to be not just a social website, but a destination for people seeking answers. Reddit informed investors on the call that it plans to remove the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in the third quarter of 2026. Through AI and machine learning, the site will be personalized to make content more relevant to every visitor.

Reddit had previously announced in 2025 its plan to merge the AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to optimize the end-user experience. In the fourth quarter, the company reported significant progress in unifying core search and AI functionalities. It also added five new languages to Reddit Answers and is piloting a dynamic AI assistant, as well as search results that include "multimedia content beyond plain text."

Despite highly valuing its own AI问答 capabilities, Reddit is not keeping them exclusively for internal use. The company's content licensing business, which allows other companies to use its data for training AI models, continues to grow. This revenue is categorized under Reddit's "Other revenue" (i.e., non-advertising revenue). In the fourth quarter of 2025, this revenue category increased by 8% year-over-year to $36 million; for the full year 2025, it grew by 22% to a total of $140 million.