Reddit lost a million search visits due to Google's AI

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated that the company lost more than one million search visits from Google in a single week in October. The drop occurred amid a decline in the platform's stock price by more than 25 percent, despite strong financial results.

According to management, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode features barely direct users to external web resources, generating zero inbound traffic for third-party sites. In response, the platform has begun testing strict entry barriers and is restructuring its strategy, aiming to become a standalone application independent of the open internet.

The new trend poses a threat to the business models of content projects that have traditionally relied on search traffic. The problem affects all publishing platforms whose monetization is built on displaying ads to users arriving from search engines.