Reddit's Ambitious Search Engine Play: A Battle Against Google, Powered by AI

Reddit, leveraging its vast user-generated data, is heavily investing in improving its search capabilities, aiming to become a go-to search engine. CEO Steve Huffman highlights the platform's weekly hundreds of millions of users seeking advice, and Reddit's efforts to convert this into active users of its native search. Core Reddit search boasts over 70 million weekly active users, while its AI-powered search tool, Reddit Answers, launched in December, has seen explosive growth, reaching 6 million weekly users from 1 million in Q1. Reddit plans to expand Reddit Answers globally, deeply integrating it into the core search experience. This move is seen as a strategic counter to Google's rising AI-powered search, which increasingly provides direct answers rather than link lists. Reddit benefits from users appending 'Reddit' to Google searches for human-generated content.