Reddit told investors on its third-quarter earnings call on October 29, 2026, that Google search referrals fell by more than one million visits a week on average in October. Chief executive Steve Huffman blamed the expansion of Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and warned that if the pace continues, total daily active users could fall by a low-double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter.
Huffman described the decline as accelerating late in the third quarter and continuing into October, with the biggest impact on logged-out and web traffic. He argued that AI Overviews and AI Mode have become the full search experience for many queries rather than an extra feature on top of classic results, so users get what they need without ever leaving Google.
His bluntest line landed hard with investors: AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for Reddit and not, as far as he knows, for anyone else. That framing matters because it reframes AI search from a new traffic channel into a replacement for the old one. For publishers, the implication is that optimising for a click from AI search is a different game from optimising for a click from ten blue links.
The warning overshadowed an otherwise strong quarter. Reddit reported third-quarter revenue of 895 million dollars, up 53 percent year over year, with advertising revenue of 847 million dollars, up 54 percent. Global daily active uniques held at 130.3 million, up 12 percent year over year, but United States daily active uniques fell 2 percent to 50.7 million, the first decline in that metric since Reddit went public in 2024.
Guidance for the fourth quarter, revenue of 1.0 to 1.03 billion dollars, trailed analyst expectations of roughly 1.05 billion dollars, and shares fell sharply after the call. The market reaction shows how seriously investors now take search-referral risk: a company can beat on revenue and still be punished when its search pipeline is visibly shrinking.
Huffman said Reddit is not building its plans around search referrals coming back. The company plans to test a primarily logged-in experience in select markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter, betting that logged-in and app users, who already account for more than 80 percent of monetisation, are a more durable base than search-driven visitors.
The shift also changes the content strategy. Logged-out, search-driven pages are the ones most exposed to AI answers, while logged-in feeds, communities, and app habits are harder for an AI summary to replace. Publishers watching Reddit should note the order of operations: first the traffic warning, then the product change, then the marketing shift toward app installs.
First, treat search-referral dependence as a risk to measure, not just a channel to grow. If a large share of your visits comes from logged-out search traffic on informational queries, AI Overviews are the exact surface that can absorb those visits. Segment that traffic now so a Reddit-style drop is visible early instead of discovered in a quarterly report.
Second, invest in the assets AI answers cite rather than only the pages that rank. Reddit content is widely cited in AI answers, yet citations did not convert into visits at the old rate. The lesson is not to abandon citations, but to pair them with direct channels: newsletters, communities, and branded search that bring users back without passing through an AI summary.
Reddit is not the first publisher to report AI-driven referral losses, but it is the largest to quantify them on an earnings call, and that changes how the story will be covered. Earlier evidence came mostly from studies, such as the finding that top results on pages with AI Overviews received far fewer clicks, and from individual publishers sharing traffic charts. An earnings-call disclosure, with audited revenue alongside it, turns an anecdote into a data point that analysts, journalists, and other publishers can cite with confidence.
Expect that citation effect to spread. Other public publishers will now face direct questions about their own AI search exposure, and their answers will create a comparable dataset where none existed before. For SEOs, that dataset is valuable: it will show which content types lose referrals fastest, whether logged-in audiences really are insulated, and whether brand lift offsets referral loss over quarters rather than weeks. The publishers that publish their own numbers early will shape that conversation; the ones that stay silent will be measured by it anyway.
Sources: B and T, October 30, 2026; The Motley Fool earnings call transcript, October 29, 2026.
Linkbaits helps you create content that earns citations and backlinks. Start with the free tools and build your first linkable asset this week.
Start free trial