It’s a common sentiment lately: Google Search is not the same as it used to be. I’d argue it’s a fantastic example of our modern internet. After the COVID ecommerce boom, basically anyone could become an affiliate seller, so millions upon millions of blogs and websites bloated their pages with SEO slop, hoping to hit high on search results. Then gen AI happened, and those same websites filled with masses of extruded information, some of it wildly inaccurate. Google got into AI too, gutting website traffic with its generated overviews.
All this combined meant searching got harder, for both searchers and trustworthy sites.
According to Search Engine Land, Google’s AI overviews can cut websites’ organic traffic 15-64%, depending on industry and search type. On top of that, the combination of AI overviews and Google Search automatically highlighting website text related to search queries, 60% of searches now result in zero clicks.
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
As for searchers? People tired of wading through the double whammy of SEO and AI slop started doing one thing that’s guaranteed to get them actual human answers: adding “Reddit” to the end of their searches.
Now, that’s not to say Reddit is some kind of AI-free utopia: It’s signed deals with Google and OpenAI to allow scraping of users’ content for LLM training. But its 400+ million active users still make it one of the internet’s largest forums, with real humans (including a fair amount of subject matter experts) asking and answering questions about literally every topic you can imagine.
For searchers, it’s become a top destination to get accurate, human-written information that’s presented–shocker!–without the intent of selling you something.
So, of course, brands are using this increased traffic to sell you something.
New data from Sensor Tower shows that Reddit’s U.S. ad spend grew 46.3% from November 2024 to November 2025.
This dataset doesn’t contain actual dollar figures, which makes it hard to weigh companies against each other apples to apples, but we do know Reddit’s Q2 2025 ad revenue was $465 million–93% of the platform’s total revenue for the quarter. Reddit’s YoY growth rate was apparently more than double Instagram‘s, and more than five times TikTok‘s. And, perhaps surprisingly, YouTube was trailing the pack, with just 1.5% growth in YoY U.S. ad spend. In middle spots were Facebook, X, and Snapchat, with the latter two almost neck and neck.
The only entity that came close to catching Reddit was mobile games–a booming market expected to grow by $82.4 billion in the U.S. by 2029.
As we mentioned above, Reddit isn’t an AI-free space. In fact, a lot of this ad growth is likely attributable to the company launching AI ad tools this year and riding that buzzword wave.
So what comes next? The answer probably won’t surprise you: Reddit’s looking to capitalize on all this traffic by becoming a prime search engine–namely through utiziling AI. (Sigh.)
During the platform’s Q2 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman said that Reddit is “positioned to become a true search destination. We offer something special, a breadth of conversations and knowledge you can’t find anywhere else.”
He added that, at the time, Reddit’s search function had more than 70 million weekly users, and its AI search, “Reddit Answers,” was used by 6 million people.
Moving forward, Reddit wants to expand Reddit Answers globally. It’s already made good on plans to merge the default search box with Reddit Answers, so they’re both in the same place, and users can choose which one to utilize.
Like many other companies throwing everything at AI, Reddit is doing well right now. But what happens when the bubble bursts?
