Reddit says the platform will start requiring a login. A first test starts during the fourth quarter in selected markets outside the US. Behind it is a sharp drop in search traffic: in October Reddit averaged over a million fewer visits from search every week. In the US, daily logged-out users fell from 30.1 to 27.3 million in a single quarter. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman points to Google’s AI answers as the main explanation. AI Mode “drives no traffic”, he says, while Google keeps pulling content from Reddit as diligently as ever. So Reddit is willing to trade reach for engagement. For us marketers the signal runs well beyond Reddit. When AI answers take the click, platforms get a reason to lock their content away, and traffic from Google becomes less and less of a given. That makes a logged-in, engaged audience worth more, both on the platforms and in your own channels.
