Reddit is moving to a “logged-in-only experience”, chief executive Steve Huffman told shareholders on Thursday. For most of its 21-year history, anyone could read the site without an account.
The plan came with Reddit’s third-quarter results, which beat analysts’ revenue estimates. In his shareholder letter, Huffman said search traffic was “down meaningfully” and that the drop sped up late in the quarter. Reddit will start testing a Reddit login requirement in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter.
“It’s a big one for us, and it’s a big one for me,” Huffman wrote.
He gave three reasons. Logged-in users get a better experience, and they give Reddit more signals for ad targeting. The change also protects “Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data” and helps Reddit adapt to new regulations around the world, he wrote.
What logged-out visitors will still see
Reddit has not decided how much of the site will stay open. In a post on Reddit, Huffman said the front page should stay available without an account. People arriving from search or a shared link should still see the post they were sent to, he wrote.
“Reddit is so big now that without some personalization, it’s just not relevant. Or even worse, it just doesn’t work,” Huffman wrote.
He said the “vast majority” of the scraping of Reddit’s data happens through logged-out browsing. Users will not have to give their real name to log in. A day earlier, Reddit announced two new feeds, a personalised For You feed and a Following feed of joined communities.
Reddit is also relaunching incognito mode in its app, Huffman and chief operating officer Jen Wong told Sara Fischer of Axios. It will be read-only, so users cannot comment or vote in it.
Users did not welcome the post. It stood at 0 upvotes with about 200 comments late on Thursday, Tom McKay reported for Gizmodo.
Search traffic fell by more than 1 million referrals a week on average in October, according to the letter. If that rate continues, Reddit’s daily active users could fall by a low-double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter, from about 130 million.
Huffman put the drop down to Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews, which answer questions on the search page itself.
“The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know,” Huffman said on the earnings call, as Jay Peters reported for The Verge.
This week, Google said its AI Mode searches earn less than regular search. After its second-quarter results, Reddit’s stock fell 20% over the same Google worries.
“Reddit is the last platform to provide basically unfettered logged-out access, and that’s largely because of me, I’ve been holding that line,” Huffman told Jonathan Vanian of CNBC.
Data deals, ads and the shares
Reddit still licenses its data to AI companies, and its two biggest data partners are OpenAI and Google, CNBC reported. Huffman told CNBC that Reddit remains “in negotiations” with Google over its deal. Reddit sued Anthropic and Perplexity over scraping in 2025. It is also killing its RSS feeds. In July, TNW reported that Reddit may cut Google off from its content.
Wong told Riley Griffin of Bloomberg that the Google talks are “complicated”. The outcomes include, “if it’s strategic, to not renew a partnership”, she said.
Revenue rose 53% to $895m in the third quarter, and ad revenue rose 54% to $847m. Other revenue, which includes data licensing, rose 35% to $48m. Daily active users grew 12% to 130.3 million worldwide but fell 2% in the US, to 50.7 million.
Logged-out daily users grew 17%, faster than logged-in users at 7%, the results show. Wong told Axios that logged-in users are about five times as engaged as logged-out ones. She put the figure at roughly 10 times in her interview with Bloomberg.
Reddit expects fourth-quarter revenue of $1bn to $1.03bn, below analysts’ estimates of $1.05bn, according to CNBC. Its shares fell about 18% in after-hours trading on Thursday, Bloomberg reported. Wong told Bloomberg the move could limit Reddit’s reach in the short term.
“I think that’s a trade that makes sense for the long term,” Wong said.