Reddit weekly search users jump 30%, as company doubles down on search strategy

Reddit’s search business is growing fast enough to look like more than a side feature. Steve Huffman said Thursday that the number of people using search on the platform every week rose 30% from a year earlier, pushing weekly search users to about 80 million from roughly 60 million.

That growth matters because Reddit is trying to turn a habit it did not invent into a product it can own. For years, millions of people have added “Reddit” to Google queries when they wanted real-world advice, product opinions, or troubleshooting tips that felt more trustworthy than polished web pages. Now Reddit is trying to pull that behavior into its own app and make the platform an “end-to-end search destination,” Huffman has said.

The shift speaks to a broader change in how people navigate the internet. Search is no longer only about finding the most optimized webpage or a machine-generated summary. It is increasingly about finding an answer that feels lived-in, argued over, and grounded in community experience. Reddit’s archive of posts and comments gives it a commercial edge in that environment, because the company can monetize attention that starts with a question and ends inside its own ecosystem.

The strategy is already showing up in the numbers. Reddit reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $663 million, up 69% from a year earlier, while ad revenue climbed 74% to $625 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin reached 40%, underscoring that the company is not just growing traffic, but converting that traffic efficiently into profit.

AI is becoming part of that push rather than a separate bet. Reddit’s AI-powered Answers feature grew from 1 million weekly active users in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter. That surge suggests users are willing to ask Reddit for synthesized responses, but still want those responses to be rooted in human discussion rather than detached, generic summaries.

For Reddit, the opportunity is clear: if people already trust the platform’s conversations enough to search for them elsewhere, that archive has real economic value. The company’s next challenge is to keep that trust intact while turning search, discussion, and AI-powered answers into one business.