Reddit is planning to unify its traditional site search and “Reddit Answers” AI tool, and give it more prominent placement in the site and mobile apps. The company is hoping to become more of a first destination for information searches, instead of Google or other search engines standing in the way.
The company is actively building on the explosive growth of its AI-powered tool, Reddit Answers. The plan is to fully unify Reddit’s core search function, which already has more than 70 million weekly users, with the Reddit Answers tool.
Unfortunately, that means Reddit will probably pester you with AI searches right on the homepage. This sounds a lot likeGoogle’s AI overview, except Google sometimes gets its information from credible sites that do research, while a lot of Reddit information comes from opinions and guesses. A common meme is that if you post a question on Reddit asking for an expert or professional, many of your comments will start with ‘not a [professional] but,’ and then the best guess or an experience.
Still, this may not be that big of a change from Google’s own search. ASemrush studyclaimed that Reddit is now the second most-cited source in Google’s own AI-generated summaries. Reddit may not like that, because while it’s good to be linked in the AI overview, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword.
Google’s new AI Overviews give direct answers and summaries, so users might not feel the need to click through to the original source anymore. This traffic cannibalization is a huge risk, andsome top news sitessaw a drop in Google Search traffic after the feature launched. This may be why Reddit wants to move away from being used by Google and have its own search.
If you’ve never used it,the Reddit Answers AItool makes concise summaries and gives direct answers from the discussions on the platform instead of using keywords to find a discussion. While it gives you a summary, it links back to the original threads, so you can get the full context if you want to.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explained, “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.”
Huffman made it pretty clear during theReddit second-quarter conference callthat the company believes it’s one of the few platforms positioned to become a “true search destination.” This is because of the “breadth of conversations and knowledge you may’t find anywhere else.”
Reddit seems to have been moving toward this goal for a while. The company updated its web protocols to give paying partners exclusive access whileblocking crawlers from competitorslike Microsoft’s Bing. So it sounds like Reddit doesn’t want to keep being the place you end up at, but instead be the search engine you start with.
