Reddit Will Lock Most of the Site Behind a Login After Google's AI Mode Gutted Its Search Traffic

For two decades, anyone could read Reddit without an account. People got so used to it that they started adding "reddit" to their Google searches just to find answers written by humans. Now the company plans to close that door.

CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday, in the shareholder letter accompanying Reddit's third quarter results, that the site is "shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience." He blames two forces: AI scrapers, and a Google that no longer sends people his way.

Huffman called it "a big change for Reddit, where we've allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades," and added that it was a big change for him too, as "someone whose life has been defined by the open internet." He still concluded it was the right decision for the platform and the business.

Investors did not immediately share his confidence. Reddit shares fell on the pivot.

Google stopped sending people

Reddit says search traffic was "down meaningfully" in the third quarter, with logged-out and web visits hit hardest. It has not stopped falling. "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," the letter says.

Huffman was blunter on the earnings call. "The reality is, the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody, as far as I know," he said. "It used to be a traffic driver, now it's not."

That makes the casual visitor from Google a shrinking asset, and not a very lucrative one. App and logged-in daily users already make up "over 80% of the monetization on Reddit."

The data is the prize

Huffman is open about the commercial logic. "It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally," he wrote. It also lets Reddit "protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data."

That corpus is worth real money. Reddit signed licensing deals with OpenAI and Google in 2024, with the Google agreement reportedly worth about $60 million a year, and it will keep licensing. Huffman said there are "active discussions" about the Google deal, and that any agreement "has to be a fair exchange of value." The company says the "vast majority" of unauthorized access to its data happens through logged-out pages, which is exactly what a login wall shuts off.

The letter also says the change helps Reddit adapt to emerging regulations. Huffman did not explicitly mention age verification laws, though a login would presumably help with those.

Where the wall goes up

The rollout will be slow, at least at first. Reddit plans to test the requirement in "select markets outside the US" in the "coming months," and has given no definitive timeline for everyone else. "We'll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there," Huffman said.

The biggest question is still open: when does a visitor from a shared link or a search result hit the "hard prompt"? Huffman says some version of Reddit will remain accessible for those moments before the demand to log in arrives.

He also insists Reddit does not need to know who its users really are. "Honestly, we don't want to know," he said. The company has rebuilt an incognito mode for the app and is releasing it again.

Users are unlikely to take this as an isolated decision. Reddit has sued over alleged unauthorized access to its data, and last month it said it would end RSS feeds on November 13, limit Old Reddit to recent users and shut public API access for apps within six months, also blaming AI scraping. The login wall is the next door to close, and the biggest. One of the last big open corners of the web is about to ask for your password.

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