Reddit told shareholders on 29 October 2026 that Google is sending it far fewer visitors. "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," the company wrote in its third-quarter letter, as reported by Search Engine Journal. Chief executive Steve Huffman named Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode as the biggest part of the company's working explanation. If one of the most-searched sites on the internet is losing clicks this way, the rest of us should plan for it too.
What exactly did Reddit say?
The facts first, because the headlines ran ahead of them.
- The drop. More than a million fewer search referrals a week, on average, during October. Reddit did not say what the weekly baseline is, or split the drop by search engine.
- The cause. Huffman said AI Overviews and AI Mode are the biggest part of the working hypothesis, because at a minimum they push other results down the page. He named machine translation as a second factor outside the US.
- AI Mode. He said AI Mode "does not drive traffic", not for Reddit and, as far as he knows, not for anyone else.
- Demand. He also said "Google is crawling us as hard as ever." Google still wants the content. It is sending fewer people to read it.
- The users who left. In the US, logged-out daily users fell from 30.1 million to 27.3 million in a quarter. Logged-in users went up slightly.
Reddit is still growing. Revenue rose 53% year on year to $895 million. The business is fine. What changed is that one of its biggest sources of new visitors is drying up, and Reddit is changing course: Reddit plans to test a logged-in-only experience in some markets outside the US this quarter.
Is this only Reddit's problem?
No. Reddit is just big enough to measure it and public enough to have to say it.
When the answer sits at the top of the page, fewer people scroll and click. That hurts every site that lives on people arriving from a search, reading one page and leaving. Blogs, review sites, documentation, comparison pages, a lot of B2B marketing.
Last week we wrote about ads in Google AI Mode going global. Put the two stories side by side. The answer page is becoming the place where the decision happens, and some of what sits on it is paid for. Organic clicks are what is left over.
What should a business that depends on search do?
Not panic, and not wait. Measure first.
Find out what is really happening to you
Split your search traffic by source and by page, week by week, for the last six months. Look for pages where impressions in Search Console hold steady but clicks fall. That gap is the signature of an answer that no longer needs your page. Reddit could not split its own drop by cause. You probably can, at least roughly, for your top twenty pages.
Stop depending on the visitor who never comes back
Reddit's response is telling. It is choosing fewer, logged-in visitors over many anonymous ones. Huffman said the company will likely trade reach for engagement. For a smaller business the same idea applies. A newsletter subscriber, a customer account or a user of your free tool is worth more than ten readers who arrived from a search and left. Every page should give the reader a reason to stay in touch.
Write what an answer box cannot replace
A short definition will be summarised. A real comparison from people who used both tools, a worked example on real data, or a tool that does something for the reader will still earn the click. If an AI answer could replace your page in two sentences, the page was always fragile.
Do not bet the plan on "AI optimisation"
Reddit's own chief operating officer said the company is "pretty skeptical of GEO", the practice of tuning content for AI answers. Some of it is sensible: clear structure, honest facts, a clear author. Most of it is guesswork about systems nobody outside Google can see.
What would I do this week?
Pull the click and impression data for your ten most important pages. If clicks are falling while impressions hold, you have your answer. Then pick one of those pages and add a reason to come back: a sign-up, a download, a tool. Search will keep changing. A direct relationship with the reader is the one channel nobody else controls.
Where Alongside fits
Deciding how a product earns and keeps its own audience when search sends fewer people is the kind of work covered by Alongside's product development.
