Reddit says Google AI Mode sends no traffic as weekly search referrals fall over 1 million

Reddit quantifies the loss

During its Q3 2026 earnings call, Reddit told investors that Google search referrals have fallen by more than 1 million per week on average in October, according to The Verge. CEO Steve Huffman tied the decline directly to Google's AI search features, saying on the call that AI Mode "does not drive traffic" — not to Reddit, and as far as he is aware, not to anyone. In his framing, this amounts to a fundamental change in how Google operates: a service that once sent visitors outward has become one that keeps them.

A reordered results page

Huffman said Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode have evolved substantially and now, at a minimum, push traditional results — Reddit's included — further down the page. He also flagged a second issue: Reddit believes content it has machine-translated into other languages is being ranked lower in Google's results, a problem he said would primarily affect the platform outside the United States.

At the same time, Huffman pushed back on the idea that interest in Reddit itself is fading. According to The Verge, he said Reddit remains one of the most common things people search for on Google, and that Google continues to crawl Reddit as heavily as ever. His summary of the situation: user demand for Reddit has not changed — Google has simply stopped routing people to the site the way it used to.

Google is not untouched by the shift. The company said a day before Reddit's call that it is seeing lower monetization from ads shown inside AI Mode, even as it expands those ads to more countries, The Verge reports.

Reddit's response

To reduce its dependence on search, Huffman said Reddit is working to become a "direct, sticky, daily destination." Two moves point in that direction: a "For You" feed of interest-based recommendations introduced the day before the earnings call, and an experiment started in August that uses AI to turn posts into short videos.

The bigger change concerns access. Reddit also announced that it will require everyone to log in. Huffman argued the move is better for user experience, better for the advertising business, more consistent with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit's data. It would also, in effect, shut out the signed-out readers who have typically arrived through Google.

Why it matters

Reddit has just put one of the clearest public numbers on what many publishers have suspected since Google began embedding AI answers into search: AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb attention that used to be handed out as clicks. A weekly loss of more than a million referrals is material even for a company of Reddit's size, and Reddit enjoys advantages most publishers lack — a brand people search for by name and communities that return on their own. Sites without that loyalty have far less room to absorb the same shift.

The episode also previews how platforms may adapt. If referral traffic can no longer be counted on, destinations are likely to invest in on-site discovery, recommendation feeds and, in Reddit's case, login walls — decisions that can improve engagement but shrink the portion of the web that casual visitors can reach at all. And with Google itself reporting weaker ad monetization inside AI Mode, the disruption to the old search bargain appears to be costing money on both sides of it.