Reddit hints at expanded AI-powered search

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the online forum tract plans to motorboat an upgraded hunt acquisition successful 2025 designed to assistance users navigate the societal web and beryllium capable to reply “subjective hard, [and] absorbing questions.”

The institution plans to execute this by integrating Reddit Answers — a diagnostic that allows visitors to inquire questions and person curated summaries of applicable responses and threads from crossed its level — into its existing search.

“[In Reddit] conversations, for 20 years, our users person near this perfectly monolithic corpus of information, truthful we’re starting to unlock that with Answers,” Huffman said during Reddit’s Q4 2024 net telephone connected Wednesday. “We’ll proceed to iterate connected this product.”

Reddit CFO Drew Vollero added during the telephone the institution is recruiting engineers to physique a “small hunt team” focused connected these capabilities.

Reddit has embraced AI arsenic it seeks to grow. Last year, the platform brought AI-powered translation to dozens of caller territories, with much planned for this year, and rolled retired AI-powered insights for brands. Reddit besides began investigating AI-powered hunt results pages, which summarize and urge contented crossed antithetic Reddit communities.

Investors were disappointed successful Reddit’s fiscal Q4 results, which were impacted successful portion by changes to Google’s hunt algorithm. Daily progressive unsocial users connected Reddit were up 39% year-over-year to 101.7 cardinal users, missing investors’ estimates of 103.1 cardinal uniques.

Huffman hinted astatine making Reddit hunt a portion of the level onboarding process to thrust growth, retention, and yet revenue.

“I deliberation helping the idiosyncratic beryllium capable to hunt straight connected Reddit, refine their queries connected Reddit, yet travel straight to Reddit for those types of queries, and adjacent integrating hunt into thing similar onboarding implicit clip — I deliberation [these are] truly absorbing things,” helium said. “It’s astonishing for america to prime up connected that signal … and of course, that awesome [has] unthinkable monetization potential.”

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