Reddit Moves Behind a Login: Search Engines Are Sending It Fewer and Fewer People, and It Won't Give Its Data to AI Bots for Free

Reddit, the forum search engines spent years sending people to for answers, is moving behind a login. The company announced it alongside its third-quarter results: instead of a site anyone can read freely, Reddit will mostly require users to be logged in. There are two reasons, and nobody's hiding them - to stop AI companies' bots from scraping its data for free and sell it through licences instead, and to keep revenue growing even as visitors drift away.

The numbers explain why. Globally, Reddit has 130.3 million daily active users, the same as the previous quarter. In the US, its biggest market, the figure fell from 53.2 to 50.7 million, down 2 percent on last year. The company said that in October, visits from search engines were falling by an average of more than a million a week, and warned that if the trend continues, daily users could drop by a double-digit percentage next quarter.

Reddit isn't alone in this. When an AI summary gives the answer right in the search engine, fewer and fewer people click the link below it, and Google's old "ten blue links" lose their point. Websites and media everywhere are feeling the same thing. The difference is scale - and the fact that Reddit has something AI labs want to buy.

And the money, for now, is flowing. Quarterly revenue jumped 53 percent to 895 million dollars (about 772 million euros), above Wall Street's expectations of around 875 million. Net income rose 74 percent to 283 million dollars. Ads brought in 847 million, and other revenue, including licensing data for AI models, 48 million. The average daily user in the US now brings Reddit 13.82 dollars, 53 percent more than a year ago.

That's the real logic of the login. A logged-in user leaves traces of what they're interested in, so ads hit more precisely, and the new algorithmic "For You" feed, unveiled the day before, has something to work with. An anonymous visitor who arrives from a search engine, reads the answer and leaves tells an advertiser far less. Reddit insists the login doesn't mean giving up on anonymity and says its "incognito" mode is being rebuilt.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman admits it isn't easy for him. "As someone whose life has been shaped by the open internet, this is a big change for me," he wrote, but concluded it's "the right decision for the platform and for the business". The change won't happen overnight: tests start in the fourth quarter in selected markets outside the US - which ones, he didn't say - and there's no timeline for the whole world.

One of the internet's biggest public reading rooms is slowly locking its door. If bots pay more than readers, who'll be next to do the same?