"Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business - not just in terms of product, but as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search together and hinted that although search is not yet monetized, "it's an enormous market and opportunity." In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be "better for most queries.""
"'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. Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation - it's a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit, he said. But LLMs can be good at this too, if not better, he said. 'So that's the direction we're going.'"
Reddit plans to merge traditional search with generative AI search and positions generative AI as superior for many queries. The company describes search as an enormous market and a potential revenue driver despite search not yet being monetized. Reddit highlights strengths on queries that require multiple perspectives rather than definitive answers. Weekly active search users grew from 60 million to 80 million over the past year, and AI-powered Reddit Answers rose from 1 million to 15 million within the year. Reddit is modernizing the AI answers interface with more media-rich responses and will unify logged-in and logged-out experiences to enable personalization using AI and machine learning starting Q3 2026.
Read at TechCrunch
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