The Reddit logo. Image: Reddit (logo, via Wikimedia Commons)
Reddit, which has let almost anyone read almost everything on it without an account for two decades, is going to start asking visitors to log in. Chief executive Steve Huffman said in the company’s third-quarter letter to shareholders on Thursday that Reddit is “shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience,” and that the first full tests will start this quarter “in select markets outside the U.S.”
The same letter shows why. Search engines, which increasingly answer questions with AI-written summaries, are sending Reddit fewer visitors, and Huffman says the pages anyone can open without an account are where most of the scraping of Reddit’s posts happens.
AI search is drying up Reddit’s traffic
Reddit’s business is booming. Revenue rose 53% to $895 million in the three months to September, and the company expects $1 billion to $1.03 billion in the final quarter of the year. But its audience in the US is shrinking: daily US visitors fell 2% from a year earlier to 50.7 million, and US visitors who weren’t logged in fell 4% to 27.3 million.
“Web search is evolving from a gateway to the web to becoming an AI-powered destination itself,” Huffman wrote. Reddit’s search referral traffic was “down meaningfully” in the quarter, the decline sped up towards the end, and it has carried on into October, when search traffic fell by more than 1 million referrals a week on average. If that continues, the letter warns, Reddit’s 130.3 million daily visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage this quarter.
That matters less to Reddit’s revenue than it sounds. Logged-in and app users, Huffman said, make up “the vast majority of engagement, and over 80% of the monetization on Reddit.” Worldwide, 76.8 million of Reddit’s daily visitors were logged out in the quarter, against 53.5 million logged in.
“The scraping and stealing of Reddit’s data”
In the letter, Huffman gave four reasons for the change: a better, more personal Reddit for users, “more signals for ads targeting,” protecting “access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data,” and adapting “to emerging regulations around the world.” He added that “pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition.”
He was blunter in a post on his own Reddit profile, titled “About that login screen,” published hours before the earnings call:
Today, the vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit (basically the scraping and stealing of Reddit’s data) happens through our logged-out experiences.
Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder and CEO
Reddit will keep selling its posts to companies that pay. It signed data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI in 2024, and Huffman wrote that it will “continue licensing our corpus intentionally,” with deals that let Reddit say “what the data can and can’t be used for and how it’s presented.” Without that, he said, “we can’t control who has access to Reddit data, where things go or what they’re used for.”
Where the test will run
Reddit hasn’t named the countries. The letter says only that it will “begin fully testing this in select markets outside the U.S.” in the fourth quarter, and that the results “will inform an optimized version of logged-in-only Reddit globally.” Nothing changes yet for readers in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany or Australia, and Reddit hasn’t said which pages, if any, will stay open to people without an account, or whether search engines will still see full threads.
Huffman admitted it is a wrench:
As someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.
Steve Huffman, in his post on Reddit
The next door to close
The login wall follows Reddit’s decision last month to end RSS feeds on November 13 and shut its public API in March 2027, which it said were common routes for large-scale scraping. The wider fight over who may take web content for AI is spreading: Meta’s new business terms let it crawl websites to train its AI without an opt-out, and many site owners are now looking for ways to block AI bots that robots.txt alone doesn’t stop.
Why it matters
Reddit is one of the biggest stores of human answers on the web, and AI tools both learn from it and quote it. If people stop clicking through from search, Reddit loses the visitors it used to turn into members, so it is trading open access for logins it can sell ads against and licences it can charge for. If the test works, a big part of the open web gets harder to read, for people and for AI scrapers alike.
Sources: Reddit Q3 2026 letter to shareholders; Reddit Q3 2026 results release; Steve Huffman, “About that login screen”.
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