Reddit’s CEO sees an opening against Google on search

Reddit CEO Stave Huffman said more people are coming to the social media site to find answers to their questions.

Reddit is a forum with over a million subreddits tailored to just about any subject one can imagine.

And beneath the many posts posted to those subreddits, over 100,000 of which are active at any given time, there are Redditors debating the post’s veracity.

This has made Reddit a valuable destination for authentic information in an internet age when truth can be hard to distill from fiction.

As a result, more people are searching for answers to their questions on Reddit than ever before.

While speaking at a conference this week hosted by The Wall Street Journal, a reporter said she now uses Google Search mostly to get to Reddit for information.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said her experience was “not unique.”

“People are going to Google with the intention of ending up on Reddit,” Huffman said at the conference. “And I think what’s happening is people know that Reddit has answers, advice, perspectives on just about whatever you’re looking for.”

Google’s decadeslong dominance of the internet search market once seemed impenetrable. But that’s changing, in part because of the arrival of artificial intelligence.

The rise of AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AI-powered search engines like Perplexity — which use large language models trained on massive amounts of data to answer user questions in natural language — have begun to eat into Google’s supremacy.

A recent study even found that younger generations, like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are no longer using the word “Google” as a verb to mean “search.”

Google launched its own AI product, Gemini, in March 2023. It now presents Google search results in natural language at the top of the page. Its rollout was rocky, however, and users have complained about the quality of its results.

While Reddit could be seen as a potential competitor to Google Search, Google itself has prioritized Reddit in its results after recent changes to its algorithm.

A Google spokesperson told B-17 at the time of the change that the company’s research shows that “people often want to learn from others’ experiences with a topic, so we’ve continued to make it easier to find helpful perspectives on Search when it’s relevant to a query.”

Google and Reddit also announced a deal in February that allows Google to train its AI models using Reddit comments. The spokesperson told B-17 that this agreement with Reddit “absolutely did not include ranking its content higher on Search.”

Huffman said at the conference that it still feels like Reddit is “married to Google” but that “more and more people learn that Reddit has just pretty much everything that you’re looking for.”

Huffman said he thinks people are drawn to Reddit because the site consists of “communities in conversation” for “literally anything you’re going through.”

“If you have questions, there’s just a high likelihood that Reddit, where people have been talking about everything for almost two decades, has an answer,” Huffman said.