Reddit and Google share a deeply interwoven and often turbulent relationship that shaped the contours of traffic flow and digital strategy of both in recent years.
Google has long been a major traffic driver for Reddit. Ranking high in search results gave Reddit exposure to millions of users who are mostly casual, logged-out visitors seeking real human opinions and niche discussions. But as Google began rolling out AI-powered search tools, namely AI Overviews and AI Mode, Reddit’s referral traffic took a hit.
Users increasingly found answers directly on Google, without needing to click through to Reddit threads.
This shift had measurable consequences. In early 2025, Reddit’s stock price dipped dramatically—40% year-to-date—with analysts warning that Google’s AI search enhancements pose an existential risk to Reddit’s traffic and advertising revenue model
In response to this threat—and to regain control—Reddit took bold steps. In mid‑2024, the company updated its robots.txt to block search engines and AI crawlers from accessing its content. But upon realizing this, Google made a deal with Reddit, where it has to pay roughly $60 million per year to maintain access for its AI training and search features.
This makes Google the only major entity still allowed, while all other crawlers were barred.
Now, during its 2025 second-quarter conference call, Reddit makes another decision.
And that decision is to merge Reddit search and Reddit Answers into a single search experience.
The reason is because Reddit's partnership with Google does preserve a crucial traffic stream, but it also artificially constrained visibility via other search platforms, limiting organic discovery and reinforcing Reddit’s dependency on just one search engine.
Since Reddit is also investing heavily in its own internal search capabilities, especially Reddit Answers, an AI-powered tool that summarizes community content based on prompts. CEO Steve Huffman emphasized that Reddit aims to evolve into a search destination in its own right, especially given uncertainties around external traffic sources.
"Reddit is one of the few platforms positioned to become a true search destination. We offer something special, a breadth of conversations and knowledge you can’t find anywhere else," Huffman said in his announcement call.
He noted that Reddit’s search function has more than 70 million weekly users, and its AI-powered Q&A product, Reddit Answers, is now used by 6 million people.
Reddit Answers is currently available in a dozen countries, and the company plans to expand it globally, as well as give it prominent placement in the site’s interface. The company eventually wants to unify the core search function with Reddit Answers, and redesign its app to have the search box be more prominently visible.
"We’re unifying those [Reddit search and Reddit Answers] into a single search experience, and we’re gonna bring that front and center in the app. So, whether you’re a new user opening the app for the first time or a returning user opening the app, that search box will be present immediately," he added.
"And I think a user may open the app, a core user may open the app, with either of those use cases in mind. And so we want to service both of those use cases as effectively as possible."
In short, Google once fueled Reddit’s ascent by surfacing visibility in Search. But that is also a windfall since Google's push into AI is not only disrupting the entire web, but also disrupting Reddit's own AI project.
Reddit is forced to rethink its strategy.
And its strategy now, is to become a search destination itself, while also grappling with dependency on a single tech giant.