For years now, Reddit has inhabited a strange and unique position on the internet. As the largest collection of forums left on the web, the 20-year-old platform has enjoyed a lot of recent growth. While the rest of the web has become spammier, more automated, and locked down, Reddit has also become an important natural resource to search engines like Google, which have sent people there by the billion. At the same time, Reddit has served as a crucial source of both training data and fetchable links for AI companies, including Google.

For Reddit, this position was tolerable for a couple of reasons. One is that the collapse of the rest of the web, and Google’s just-send-them-to-Reddit solution for this problem, resulted in a long stretch of enormous growth for the platform, and at just the right time (Reddit went public in early 2024). Another reason is that the company was getting paid directly by both OpenAI and Google. (It is currently suing Anthropic.) In 2025, Reddit acknowledged some tension in its situation. “We get a ton of traffic from Google today,” CEO Steve Huffman told me last year. “We know that’s not forever.” Still, he said, “the core of Reddit actually becomes more valuable over time when the rest of the internet turns into AI.”

This month, despite a strong quarterly earnings report, shareholders questioned that theory. Revenue was up, the company was more profitable than ever, and future guidance was ambitious. But the stock tanked, in part due to disclosures about the company’s dynamic with Google. “Search referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter,” Huffman said in his letter to investors. “While our visibility in referral traffic remains low, we’re not building for........

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