Reddit plans to end the open, no-account way of browsing its site. CEO Steve Huffman set out the shift in a shareholder letter on 29 October, saying visitors will eventually have to sign in to see anything.
“It also allows us to protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data, and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world.”
Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, in a shareholder letter · engadget.com ↗
The change will be tried first in selected markets outside the US during the fourth quarter, then rolled out in phases. Reddit ties the move to a sharp fall in the traffic it gets from search, as AI-driven answers replace clicks through to sites like its own.
Huffman's case is partly commercial: a signed-in audience gives Reddit more signals for targeting ads and tends to engage more. He also says it helps Reddit control access to its data and prepare for new rules emerging around the world. He calls the step big but necessary.
About Reddit
Reddit is an American social news and discussion platform where registered users post links, text and media to topic communities. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded it in June 2005.
In February 2024 it announced a deal worth about $60 million a year to license its user content to Google for AI training, and in March 2024 it went public in an IPO that raised $600 million. This is not the first time search and AI have worried its investors: on its second-quarter results on 30 July 2026, Huffman said search referrals were choppy and traffic more volatile late in the quarter, and the stock fell more than 10% after hours as analysts raised a US user problem as search moved to AI.
Engadget notes that Reddit has been contesting AI scraping and the way search is changing, and expects some users to react badly, a few of them already irritated by limits on Old Reddit.
Sources · 1