Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, announced that the platform aims to enhance its search functionality in 2025, with the goal of assisting users in navigating the social network and addressing “subjective hard, [and] interesting questions.”
To achieve this, the company intends to incorporate Reddit Answers—a feature allowing users to pose questions and receive curated summaries of related replies and discussions from throughout the site—into its current search system.
“For two decades, our users have generated an enormous amount of information on Reddit, and we are now beginning to unlock that treasure with Answers,” Huffman mentioned during Reddit’s Q4 2024 earnings call on Wednesday. “We will continue to refine this product.”
During the call, Reddit CFO Drew Vollero stated that the company is in the process of hiring engineers to form a “small search team” dedicated to developing these features.
As part of its growth strategy, Reddit has embraced AI technology. Last year, the platform introduced AI-driven translation to numerous new regions, with further expansions planned for this year, in addition to launching AI-generated insights for brands. Reddit has also begun experimenting with AI-enhanced search results pages that summarize and recommend content from various Reddit communities.
Investors expressed disappointment with Reddit’s fiscal Q4 performance, which was partly influenced by changes in Google’s search algorithm. Daily active unique users on Reddit increased by 39% year-over-year to reach 101.7 million, falling short of investor expectations of 103.1 million unique users.
Huffman suggested that integrating Reddit search into the onboarding process could effectively drive growth, improve retention, and ultimately boost revenue.
“I believe that helping users search directly on Reddit, refine their queries, and ultimately encourage them to come directly to Reddit for specific queries—potentially even incorporating search into onboarding over time—represents some truly intriguing opportunities,” he remarked. “It’s significant for us to recognize that signal […], and naturally, that signal holds immense monetization potential.”
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