Reddit has signaled a major strategic shift, identifying its AI-powered search engine as the next significant opportunity for product innovation and a key future revenue stream. During its fourth-quarter earnings call, the company detailed its vision to merge traditional and AI search, positioning itself as a primary destination for users seeking answers and diverse perspectives.
A New Vision for Search
Reddit’s leadership believes that generative AI search will ultimately be “better for most queries” than traditional search engines. The platform’s unique strength lies in its vast repository of human conversations and experiences.
“There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I would argue, the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. He contrasted this with traditional search, which often functions as navigation to a specific link, a task that Large Language Models (LLMs) can also handle effectively.
Impressive User Growth Signals Potential
The company’s early efforts in AI-powered search are already showing significant traction. Over the past year, weekly active users for search grew by 30%, increasing from 60 million to 80 million.
More impressively, the AI-powered Reddit Answers feature saw its weekly active users skyrocket from just 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter. “We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential too,” Huffman added.
Unifying and Personalizing the Platform
Reddit is actively working to unify its core search and AI features to create a seamless user experience. The company announced it has made “significant progress” on this front and is already piloting a more modern interface with media-rich answers and support for five new languages.
In a significant move to broaden its appeal, Reddit plans to eliminate the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in Q3 2026. The goal is to leverage AI and machine learning to personalize the site for every visitor, transforming it from a social site into a universally relevant answer engine. This strategy is complemented by its growing content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on Reddit’s valuable data, contributing to a 22% year-over-year increase in its non-ad “other” revenue for 2025.
Relevance for the MENA Tech Scene
Reddit’s strategic pivot offers crucial insights for the MENA startup ecosystem. Firstly, it underscores the immense value of unique, user-generated data, especially localized content. MENA startups with rich Arabic-language datasets possess a significant asset for training region-specific AI models.
Secondly, as global platforms integrate sophisticated AI search, user expectations across MENA will evolve. Regional e-commerce, media, and content platforms must consider adopting similar AI-driven features to remain competitive and meet the growing demand for conversational, intuitive information discovery. Finally, Reddit’s dual strategy of enhancing user experience while monetizing data through B2B licensing provides a compelling blueprint for MENA startups to explore diverse revenue streams beyond traditional advertising.
About Reddit
Reddit is a vast network of communities created, run, and populated by its users. Through these communities, people can dive into their interests, hobbies, and passions. With over 100,000 active communities, Reddit is home to conversations on a wide range of topics, from news and entertainment to niche hobbies and support groups.
Source: TechCrunch
