Can Reddit Survive the AI Boom? - New York Magazine

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer For years now, Reddit has inhabited a strange and unique position on the internet. As the largest collection of forums left on the web, the 20-year-old platform has enjoyed a lot of recent growth. While the rest of the web has become spammier, more automated, and locked down, Reddit has also become an important natural resource to search engines like Google, which have sent people there by the billion. At the same time, Reddit has served as a crucial source of both training data and fetchable links for AI companies, including Google. For Reddit, this position was tolerable for a couple of reasons. One is that the collapse of the rest of the web, and Google’s just-send-them-to-Reddit solution for this problem, resulted in a long stretch of enormous growth for the platform, and at just the right time (Reddit went public in early 2024). Another reason is that the company was getting paid directly by both OpenAI and Google. (It is currently suing Anthropic.) In 2025, Reddit acknowledged some tension in its situation. “We get a ton of traffic from Google today,” CEO Steve Huffman told me last year. “We know that’s not forever.” Still, he said, “the core of Reddit actually becomes more valuable over time when the rest of the internet turns into AI.” This month, despite a strong quarterly earnings report, shareholders questioned that theory. Revenue was up, the company was more profitable than ever, and future guidance was ambitious. But the stock tanked, in part due to disclosures about the company’s dynamic with Google. “Search referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter,” Huffman said in his letter to investors. “While our visibility in referral traffic remains low, we’re not building for drive-by traffic … People will always want to hear from other people: real opinions, expertise, stories, and communities where they can ask, learn, argue, and belong.” A couple of weeks earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit, alongside other publishers, had been reconsidering its relationship with Google. It’s easy to understand why. Increases in search traffic, as Huffman had suggested last year, couldn’t go on forever — Reddit’s explosive growth in 2024 and 2025 always had this asterisk, and the people casually encountering Reddit posts in Google results tended not to stick around to contribute to the site. But as any Google user can attest, the prominence of Reddit links has also been overshadowed by even more prominent AI Overviews, which often summarize Reddit content, citing it as a footnote but giving searchers little reason to click through to the source. It’s always been dangerous for publishers to depend on megaplatforms loaning their audiences, and over time, most of them — Facebook, X, and now Google — have evolved in ways that discourage users from leaving the core product. What’s different this time, for Reddit and anyone else in Google’s search index and AI-training data, is that “search” has been turned into an automated summarization process. Google isn’t just indexing Reddit or excerpting Reddit to answer prompts and queries. It’s ripping it off, automatically and at scale. In some ways, this makes Reddit more valuable than ever to Google, even as it’s getting less out of their arrangement. At the very least, to borrow a term of art from the AI world, you could say that Google is distilling Reddit, and in the process upgrading its AI Overviews from semi-redundant alternative search results into to-the-point summaries of things people have written on the platform (or elsewhere). At the Verge, Mia Sato reports on how marketers are trying to take advantage of this situation: According to data compiled for The Verge by Semrush, an SEO company owned by Adobe, Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by AI tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini and AI Mode — more than any news publisher, repositories of scholarly articles, and even Wikipedia. AI responses are also encroaching into the online shopping journey: Semrush also found that compared to a year ago, Google is inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into search queries with commercial intent, like when shoppers are doing research on products or comparing brands. Now, she reports, “a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI,” descending on the site “to try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers.” Again, this focus on gaming Reddit with scammy search-type optimization is a testament to how much value is tied up in the platform, but it also highlights how much of it is being extracted by AI firms. Reddit is making AI products better while those same products make Reddit worse: Moderators are being flooded with AI content, and users are engaging in constant mutual accusations of AI use. Functionally, chatbot links are akin to citations, which is to say they exist as a way to give credit, shift responsibility, and provide the option of looking at source material — a norm that makes sense in the context of, say, a legal document, research paper, or even a not-for-profit online encyclopedia. But many of the “sources” being “cited” by chatbots, including Google’s, are produced by businesses that depend on direct attention, not sourcing as a courtesy. That includes Reddit. There are risks here for Google, and other AI firms, as the public corpus of useful information gets thinner, spammier, and more extensively locked behind paywalls (already, if you send a chatbot on a research mission, it will often scrape and cite low-quality sources, many written by AI themselves; the end result is often still passable, but the supply chain of information for, say, an e-commerce search is already pretty nasty and seems to be getting worse). But it’s not quite obvious how much leverage Reddit has here. If we assume its threat to end its relationship with Google is a negotiation tactic, and that Reddit is about ask for a lot more than the eight figures it’s already getting from the company, we’re about to find out. 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