Reddit Announces Plan to Enhance Search Experience

Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman stated that, this year, Reddit intends to launch an upgraded search experience that will enable users to navigate the platform and answer "subjective, hard, and interesting questions." This will be achieved by integrating Reddit Answers, a feature allowing users to ask questions and receive curated summaries of relevant responses and threads across the platform, into the existing search.

"In Reddit, over the past 20 years, our users have created an enormous repository of information, and we’re now starting to unlock that with Answers," Huffman said during the Q4 2024 earnings call on Wednesday. "We’ll continue to iterate on this product."

The Chief Financial Officer, Drew Vollero, added that Reddit is recruiting engineers to build a "small search team" focusing on these capabilities.

Reddit’s Growing Emphasis on AI

Reddit is increasingly adopting AI as it pursues growth. Last year, the platform introduced AI-powered translation to dozens of new territories, with more planned for this year, and rolled out AI-powered insights for brands. Reddit also started testing AI-powered search result pages, which summarize and recommend content across different Reddit communities.

Disappointing Q4 Metrics

Investors were disappointed with Reddit’s fiscal Q4 metrics, partly due to changes in Google’s search algorithm. The platform reported a 39% year-over-year increase in daily active unique users to 101.7 million users, falling short of investors’ estimates of 103.1 million.

Improving Search and Revenue Potential

Huffmananticipated making Reddit search a part of the platform onboarding process to drive growth, retention, and ultimately revenue.

"I think helping the user be able to search directly on Reddit, refine their queries on Reddit, eventually come directly to Reddit for those types of queries, and even integrating search into something like onboarding over time – I think those are really interesting things," he said. "It’s amazing to pick up on that signal, and of course, that signal is incredible monetization potential."