Reddit's Huffman: search referrals turned "choppy" as AI answers the question first

The search box you built your growth on is changing shape. People used to type a query, scan a page of blue links, and click through to you. Now they ask a chatbot, read the answer, and never leave. That shift is already showing up in the numbers, in the spam clogging your favorite forums, and in features that ship and die in a day. Let me catch you up.

Reddit's traffic just got "choppy"

Reddit posted a strong quarter, $805 million in revenue, up 61% year over year, and the stock still dropped more than 10%. The reason was one line in a letter to shareholders. CEO Steve Huffman warned that search referrals were "choppy" and traffic got more volatile late in the quarter.

Here is why that matters to you. Reddit signed a deal in 2024 to feed its content to Google for AI training. Now Google's AI summaries answer the question on the results page, so people never click through to Reddit. U.S. daily users slipped, from 53.5 million to 53.2 million. One analyst put it plainly on the call: as search shifts to AI, "you're not going to get referrals."

If a site this big feels the pull, your organic traffic assumptions are worth a hard look too.

The site every chatbot cites

There is a twist. Even as AI pulls traffic away, AI made Reddit more valuable. Data from Semrush, shared with The Verge, showed Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's Gemini and AI Mode. More than any news outlet, more than Wikipedia.

So brands stopped chasing clicks and started chasing mentions. SEO experts told The Verge that a brand no longer needs a backlink to get cited by a chatbot. A mention is enough. That changed where marketers spend their time. They flood Reddit threads hoping the bots pick up their name.

Being the answer is the new game. Getting the click is the old one, and it is fading.

The spam got harder to spot

The old tells were easy. A review too glowing, a tracking link, a stolen before-and-after photo. Now the spam mimics how you'd prompt a chatbot. A fake question like "How does everyone track their skincare routine?" gets a wave of brand-friendly replies. Skincare moderator Maya Adivi said even a detailed writeup now draws suspicion.

Reddit is fighting back with its own AI. The company said it now catches 25,000 spammy posts and blocks 23 million spam views a day. Roughly 40% of discussions on the platform are commercial in nature, per Reddit. The trust that made Reddit useful, real people saying real things, is exactly what marketers are trying to fake.

Ship fast, break trust

Google put its Nano Banana image generator into Google Earth. The pitch was infographics, historical views, dream-home mockups. People instead generated a plane hitting the World Trade Center, the Eiffel Tower destroyed, and refugees staged near the Mexican border that could pass as satellite images.

Google pulled it one day after launch. The rollback note said people "uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world." A top reply nailed the failure: "There is 0 chance that no one on your development team didn't raise exactly this concern." As one writer put it, generative AI has no place in an educational tool whose whole value is being accurate.

The deep cut

The signal underneath all of this is that people are getting tired of synthetic content, and they are learning to spot it. Carly Ayres tracked the mood shift on social feeds, where AI prose, ragebait, and "slop" got laughed off the timeline. Packy McCormick called it an "antibody response," people rejecting content that wastes their time.

That gives you a concrete move. If your growth plan leans on AI-written content or gaming AI search, you are building on ground that is both shifting and getting more suspicious. The safer bet is the thing that survives all of this: real answers from real people that hold up when someone checks. Force your product and your marketing to be specific and honest, because vague pitches get filtered out and fakes get caught.

Three questions for your team

1. If organic search traffic dropped 20% next quarter because AI answers the question first, which acquisition channels carry the load, and are we funding them now?

2. Are we chasing clicks or chasing mentions? Where does our brand actually show up when someone asks a chatbot for a recommendation in our category, and who owns finding out?

3. Before we ship the next AI feature, have we asked the Google Earth question out loud: what is the worst thing a user could make this do, and does it break the trust our product runs on?