Reddit will move towards a primarily logged-in experience, ending a two-decade-old model that allowed people to read most posts without an account. On Thursday, chief executive Steve Huffman announced the plan during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
The company will first test mandatory sign-ins in selected markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter. Reddit will study engagement, retention, and advertising growth before deciding whether to extend the policy globally.
Huffman blamed Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode for a steep fall in search referrals. He said Reddit's search referrals fell by more than one million a week on average in October.
Huffman told investors, “AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody. Google remains an important crawler of Reddit, but its AI answers increasingly keep users on the search page instead of sending them to the platform.”
The company said the decline was sharpest among logged-out users and visitors accessing Reddit through the web. It warned that daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if current search trends continue.
Logged-in users matter most to Reddit’s business. They account for more than 80 percent of the company’s monetisation and provide richer signals for personalized content and advertising. The company will continue to license data to approved partners, including Google and OpenAI. The change is designed to separate legitimate commercial access from large-scale scraping.
Huffman said, “A login-first platform would improve content discovery, raise engagement and support safer, more regulated user experiences. Reddit must persuade casual search visitors to create accounts rather than lose them at the door.”
The move marks one of the biggest strategic shifts in Reddit’s 21-year history. The platform grew by serving communities through the open web; it now wants users to come directly, sign in and stay.
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