Reddit reported a remarkably strong quarter in July. Revenue reached $804.905 million, up 61% from a year earlier. Daily active uniques reached 130.3 million, advertising revenue grew 64%, and net income reached $252.848 million.
Then the shares fell 21% in the first full trading session after the report. CNBC framed the reaction around a familiar concern: How dependent is Reddit on Google to keep sending new people?
That isn’t an unreasonable question. Search traffic matters. But I think the reaction revealed something much bigger about how we still value companies and understand the internet.
There is an irony in how investors talk about AI. They are willing to price in years of potential even when the revenue required to support those valuations remains uncertain. Reddit can report real revenue, profit, advertising growth, and community growth today, yet still be discounted because one source of traffic becomes volatile. And much of the future value being assigned to AI depends on access to the kind of human conversation Reddit already owns.
The stock market has Reddit backwards.
It is measuring the distribution of Reddit’s value instead of the source of it. It is asking how many people Google sends to Reddit, how often an AI platform cites Reddit, and what a licensing agreement is worth. It isn’t fully measuring why people keep looking for Reddit, why Google changed Search to surface more forum conversations, or why AI companies need access to those conversations in the first place.
Reddit’s own Q2 shareholder letter makes this distinction. The company acknowledged the search volatility, but it also said it isn’t building for drive-by traffic. It is building a daily destination.
I think that is the real story.
The Old Lens Is Breaking
For more than a decade, we built the web around what we could measure.
We measured rankings, impressions, pageviews, clicks, sessions, conversions, and the last channel someone touched before buying. Then we slowly began treating those measurements as explanations for why people made a decision.
But a pageview proves that a page loaded. A click proves that someone clicked. The last measurable interaction tells us what happened last. None of those things automatically tells us what someone understood, trusted, remembered, or needed before feeling comfortable enough to act.
We have known this for a long time. In 2014, Chartbeat analyzed 2 billion web visits and found that 55% lasted fewer than 15 seconds. It also found no relationship between sharing and attention. Later eBay paid-search experiments showed that attributed ad clicks can capture demand that already exists, while Facebook experiments showed that even extensive demographic and behavioral data can fail to recover the causal effect of advertising.
The problem isn’t that these metrics mean nothing. The problem is that we keep asking them to explain things they were never built to measure.
That old lens is becoming even less useful as search and AI separate influence from traffic.
The Reuters Institute found that Google organic traffic to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% globally and 38% in the United States between November 2024 and November 2025. Pew analyzed 68,879 Google searches made by 900 U.S. adults. In that sample, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, compared with 15% without one. A source inside the summary drew a click in just 1% of visits.
The information can still shape the answer. A source may still influence the decision. The click report alone can’t show us how much.
The bargain that powered the web for years is changing. Create useful information, earn visibility, receive traffic, and turn some of that traffic into revenue. AI can now use the information without always delivering the visit.
Traffic isn’t irrelevant. It just tells less of the story.
The Phase We Stopped Seeing
As we compressed the user journey into the stages our analytics could see, we lost sight of one of the most important parts: validation.
We became very good at discovery. We became very good at helping people filter a thousand choices down to three. But once those three choices looked similar, more information didn’t always help.
Think about buying a car. Specifications, price, safety ratings, and features narrow the options. But when three comparable cars remain, another chart usually isn’t what settles the decision. You want to hear from someone who has owned the car. What broke? Would they buy it again? What do they wish they had known?
That is the validation phase.
It isn’t only about making the objectively best choice. It is about feeling comfortable with the choice you make. It gives you context, point and counterpoint, and a sense that you aren’t carrying the decision alone.
We didn’t remove that need from people. We removed it from the way we measure them.
AI makes this gap more visible because it can give us an answer faster than ever while still leaving us unsure whether the answer deserves our confidence. Across the 48 markets included in its 2026 Digital News Report, the Reuters Institute found that trust in AI chatbot answers about news was 20%, compared with 37% for news overall.
Faster access to information doesn’t automatically create confidence. The next era of the web can’t only be about giving people answers faster. It has to help them understand why an answer should be trusted and let them see the experience behind it.
Reddit Preserved What The Web Lost
I’ve been on Reddit for roughly 20 years, since 2006. I’ve used it as a person, moderated communities, worked with teams inside Reddit, and helped a lot of companies figure out how to participate without being rejected by the communities they want to reach. Across all of that work, the thing that has always made Reddit different is conversation.
People can find an answer, challenge it, ask a follow-up question, see someone disagree, read what happened six months later, and decide which experience is closest to their own. They don’t only see the recommendation. They see how the recommendation survived contact with other people.
That is why people began adding Reddit to Google searches long before the current AI agreements became the story. Reddit reported, based on its Google Search Console data, that people added the word Reddit to Google searches 32 billion times from December 2022 through November 2023. That was a Reddit-reported aggregate, not a count of unique people or clicks, but the behavior is what matters.
People were actively asking Google to get them to Reddit. That behavior suggests the normal results weren’t giving them the human part of the answer.
Google saw the same demand. In May 2023, it announced changes designed to surface more firsthand experience and perspectives. Amsive’s Sistrix chart shows that Reddit’s rise in Google visibility was already underway before the expanded Google partnership was announced in February 2024.
Google didn’t create the value of Reddit. It responded to the demand for it.
The same is true for AI companies. Google and OpenAI secured structured, real-time access to Reddit, and both companies said that access would help their products use fresher or more recent information.
By Q2 2026, Reddit contained more than 26 billion posts and comments across more than 100,000 active communities. That is not a static archive. It is a constantly changing record of human experience and judgment.
If Reddit ended those agreements tomorrow, it would likely lose licensing revenue, reach, and some growth. But the thing that made the agreements valuable would still exist.
The conversations created the partnerships. The partnerships didn’t create the conversations.
Reddit Is Already Moving Toward 2027
I am not worried that Reddit is going to fail because its stock fluctuates or search traffic changes. I don’t see another major platform that has reproduced this kind of conversation at Reddit’s scale.
The larger risk is that Reddit doesn’t fully cement itself as the dominant place on the web for meaningful conversation and human validation before someone else finds a way to compete for that role.
Reddit is already moving in the right direction.
More than 80 million people were searching directly on Reddit each week by Q4 2025, up from 60 million a year earlier. Reddit Answers grew from 1 million weekly active uniques in Q1 to 15 million in Q4 and has since merged into Reddit search.
Reddit Answers doesn’t have to replace the conversation. It can organize what people are saying, then bring someone into the posts and communities where they can compare experiences, see disagreement, ask a follow-up question, and judge the answer for themselves.
Reddit put this perfectly in its Q2 shareholder letter: “People don’t want a summary of Reddit; they want Reddit.”
Heading into 2027, that is the opportunity. Reddit can become the place people choose before Google or an AI system sends them there. Reddit search can become the natural next step when someone wants to know what people actually think. The app, the home feed, Reddit Answers, communities, and ongoing conversations can work together to turn occasional discovery into a direct habit.
This is what I mean when I say the market is using the wrong lens. Search referrals measure one way people reach Reddit. They don’t measure how a Reddit conversation changes the next query, shapes an AI answer, moves a product into the final comparison, changes a brand perception, or gives someone enough confidence to act. If the report only asks whether Reddit produced the last click, most of that influence disappears.
The future value isn’t only in receiving traffic. It is in owning the conversation that everyone else needs.
Where Organic Participation Belongs
This is also where organic participation fits, but not as an argument against paid media.
Organic is the participation layer that can make the paid business stronger and more durable.
Reddit is already seeing this. During a February 2026 earnings call, Steve Huffman said companies wanted to participate organically, provide support, and make their knowledge available. He connected strong organic experiences through Reddit Pro to a larger relationship with Reddit.
That matches exactly what I am seeing.
In my client work, I am seeing Fortune 500 companies build Reddit teams of up to 30 people and spend more than a year developing company-wide programs before they are ready to advertise. They aren’t avoiding Reddit. They are making a serious commitment to it. They need to understand the communities, define how their employees and brand accounts should participate, and feel confident that the presence they build is safe.
In one engagement with a major insurance company, the brand had built a strong organic presence and was planning a larger Reddit program with advertising investment the following year. After more employees joined, Reddit banned several of the accounts, and it took about a month to restore them. Leadership ultimately scrapped the larger program, including the planned ad spend, because it no longer felt confident that the presence it built would be safe if legitimate employee participation was misunderstood.
Reddit had a legitimate responsibility to protect its communities from manipulation. The company had a legitimate reason to protect its people, accounts, and reputation. Both things can be true.
Reddit Pro is an important start. Reddit also has a formal agency partner path for companies managing advertising. What I would love to see in 2027 is a comparable organic partner path built around training, disclosure, account roles, community behavior, safety, and a dependable way to resolve misunderstandings.
That shouldn’t give brands influence over moderators or control inside communities. It should help responsible companies participate while helping Reddit separate legitimate activity from manipulation.
This isn’t organic instead of paid. It is organic before and alongside paid.
In my experience, brands spend where they understand the opportunity. They stay where they have built a presence, and they spend more where they feel they belong. Once a company understands where it fits on Reddit, what people need, and how the community wants it to participate, the advertising opportunity becomes much clearer.
The result is better participation, better advertising, stronger communities, and companies that stay because Reddit has become part of how they operate.
What Reddit Can Become
The internet spent years making information easier to distribute while making decisions harder to trust.
Reddit grew because it preserved what that system pushed aside: lived experience, disagreement, context, follow-up questions, memory, and people helping other people become comfortable with a decision.
Stock performance, search traffic, advertising growth, licensing agreements, and AI citations all matter. But they are measurements around the value. They are not the value itself.
Reddit is ready to win because the need it serves is becoming more important, not less. As AI makes information abundant, human experience becomes harder to replace. As search sends fewer visits, direct community and belonging become more valuable. As people become less sure what to trust, validation becomes part of the product.
My hope for 2027 is that Reddit keeps building toward that larger position. Make Reddit the destination where people search for human judgment. Help responsible companies participate without weakening what makes the communities work. Let organic presence create understanding and belonging, then let paid media extend what has already earned a place there.
At OGS Media, we are dedicated to helping brands do Reddit right. I will keep teaching what I have learned through webinars, articles, training, and direct work with company teams. I am also committed to working with Reddit, sharing my guidance, ideas, and feedback, helping test new approaches, and bringing the firsthand experience that comes from seeing where companies succeed, where they struggle, and why they sometimes walk away.
I don’t want to simply point at the opportunity. I want to help Reddit make it real.
Sources:
- Reddit Q2 2026 Earnings Press Release, revenue, daily active uniques, advertising growth, and net income.
- CNBC, Reddit Q2 2026 earnings report, investor reaction and concerns about search referrals.
- Reddit Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter, search volatility, daily-destination strategy, active communities, posts and comments, and the Reddit summary quotation.
- TIME, “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong”, Chartbeat’s analysis of attention, visits, and sharing.
- National Bureau of Economic Research, “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness”, the eBay paid-search experiments.
- Marketing Science, “A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement”, Facebook advertising experiments and causal measurement.
- Reuters Institute, Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026, changes in Google organic traffic to news sites.
- Pew Research Center, Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears, the AI summary click study.
- Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, trust in AI chatbot answers about news and trust in news overall.
- Reddit, Recommendation Journeys for Products, Google searches containing the word Reddit.
- Google, Learn From Others’ Experiences With More Perspectives on Search, Google’s move toward firsthand experience and perspectives.
- Amsive, Reddit’s SEO Growth, Sistrix visibility data and the timing of Reddit’s Google growth.
- From “Asurion is a scam” to the answer ChatGPT trusts, the big brand Reddit case study
- Google, An Expanded Partnership With Reddit, Google’s structured, real-time access to Reddit content.
- OpenAI and Reddit Partnership, OpenAI’s structured, real-time access to Reddit content.
- Reddit Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter, weekly active uniques searching directly on Reddit.
- Reddit Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript, Reddit Answers growth and Steve Huffman’s comments about organic participation and Reddit Pro.
- Reddit, Introducing Reddit Answers, the integration of Reddit Answers into Reddit search.
- Reddit Ads Agency Partners, the existing agency partner program for companies managing advertising.
- Reddit for Business, Ask a Reddit Marketing Veteran Anything, Brent Csutoras’s history as a Redditor since 2006, moderator, and Reddit alpha tester.
- ChartExchange, RDDT Historical Stock Prices, Reddit’s July 30 and July 31 closing prices and the first full post-earnings trading-session decline.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Brent Csutoras/Search Engine Journal
