Reddit Will Force Users To Log In As Google AI Cannibalizes Search
Co-Founder and CEO Steve Huffman made the announcement during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call, explaining that it will allow it to protect its “extremely valuable corpus of data,” from being scraped for training AI chatbots. These chatbots have fundamentally changed the way a lot of users get their information, as they rarely leave their chosen app to go visit a site the information was pulled from.
That’s reflected in Reddit's traffic. Huffman shared that its “search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter,” as users start to rely more on AI powered chatbots for answers. Additionally, he would add that “Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet,” as AI overviews have become the focus of its search experience.
The move to force users to login is also a bid to “retain new audiences.” When users are logged-in it typically leads to more engagement with the platform, and it’s able to get far more user data that can then be used for targeted ads. The company believes that it will be a worthwhile trade-off to lose traffic from random web searches in exchange for the extra engagement and higher-value ads-based revenue.
The login requirement will first be rolled out to “select markets outside the US,” so the company can fine tune how it’ll work before the change is pushed to the rest of its userbase across the globe.
It’s disappointing that Reddit will be making its communities less accessible to the wider internet, and it feels like other measures could’ve been put in place to block the AI scraping. Although the siren song of higher user engagement and ad revenue also played a big role in this decision.
