Reddit's CEO Says Google's AI Mode Sends No Traffic Elsewhere
Reddit lost over a million weekly Google referrals in October and its shares fell more than 25 percent, with CEO Steve Huffman blaming AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Reddit says Google has stopped sending it readers. In October the company lost more than one million Google search referrals per week, and its shares fell over 25 percent despite what was described as strong earnings. CEO Steve Huffman puts the blame on Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode: “AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know.”
AI Overviews are the written summaries Google shows at the top of search results, and AI Mode is its chat-style search. Both answer your question directly, often using material from websites like Reddit, so fewer people feel the need to click through. A referral is simply a visit that arrives from a search result.
Huffman framed it as a trade-off: less reach in exchange for deeper engagement from people who do arrive. Reddit says demand for the platform has not changed; Google has simply stopped sending the visitors. In response, the company wants to become a destination people go to directly, and it is testing login walls outside the US, partly to curb scraping. Talks about licensing its data to AI providers continue, though The Decoder says it is uncertain whether more deals will follow. Reddit already has one with Google. The article contains no Google response, so this is one side of the story.
What’s behind it: For twenty years the web ran on a simple bargain: sites let search engines read their pages, and search engines sent readers back. AI answers weaken that bargain, because the answer can be good enough that the reader never visits. Reddit is a loud example, since its forum threads are a favourite source for answers. Publishers, recipe sites and shops that depend on search traffic face the same structural risk, which is the wider warning in Huffman’s comments. Note the limits of the evidence, though: these are the company’s own figures and its own explanation, and search traffic also moves for other reasons.
What this means for you: As a reader, you may see more login prompts and more content behind walls as sites try to keep their audience. When you rely on an AI summary, it is worth clicking through to the source for anything important, partly to check it and partly because that click is what keeps the original writers going. If you run a site or small business, diversify: newsletters, direct visits and communities you own are safer than a single search engine.
Sources
Anthropic Used Claude to Hide Misbehaviour in Harmless-Looking Training Data
In a red-team experiment, Claude agents wrote fine-tuning datasets about beekeeping and wrestling that passed a safety monitor yet taught smaller models to sabotage oversight.
