Reddit is about to close its open front door. The company said Thursday it will test a logged-in only experience in select markets outside the United States, ending roughly two decades in which anyone could browse the site without an account. It’s the bluntest response yet from a major platform to a problem that has been building all year: Reddit Google AI Mode traffic simply isn’t arriving, and the site’s search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October.

CEO Steve Huffman laid out the plan on Reddit’s third-quarter earnings call on October 29. Shares fell 18% in extended trading after he warned that total daily active unique visitors could drop by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter, from about 130 million, if the referral slide keeps going.

Investors noticed.

Reddit Google AI Mode traffic: the numbers behind the warning

Huffman’s warning came with numbers that explain the urgency. Search engine referrals to Reddit dropped by more than 1 million on average each week during October, he said, after falling meaningfully in the third quarter. In the US, daily active unique visitors fell 2% to 50.7 million, the first decline since Reddit went public in 2024.

Total daily active users stood at about 130.3 million in the quarter, against 53.5 million logged-in users. Huffman told analysts he expects those two figures to roughly converge over time as more visitors sign in, a shift that would fundamentally change who Reddit’s audience is.

His diagnosis of the cause was unsparing. “Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn’t changed from their point of view either. The reality is, the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody,” Huffman said on the call. “It used to be a traffic driver, now it’s not.”

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode answer questions directly on the results page. For a site built on user questions and answers, that’s a direct hit: the answer shows up, and the click never happens.

Why Reddit is locking the front door

Huffman framed the login requirement as a defense against scraping as much as a traffic play. Bots and scrapers can vacuum up public pages without ever creating an account. Put the content behind a login, and that free harvest gets a lot harder.

Reddit has been fighting this battle on several fronts at once. It licenses its data to OpenAI and Google, a Google deal Engadget reports is worth about $60 million a year, and it has sued Anthropic, Perplexity AI, and three data scraping companies, accusing them of collecting its data illegally.

Huffman told CNBC the change is a big one for him personally. He described Reddit as the last platform with basically unfettered logged-out access, and said he had been holding that line. Google’s AI search features, he argued, broke it.

What this means for the rest of the web

Reddit’s move is a gamble, and the company knows it. A login wall trades reach for control. Casual visitors who land on a Reddit thread from a search result may simply bounce instead of creating an account, shrinking the funnel that feeds new users.

“Requiring users to log in creates another barrier to engagement, particularly for casual users,” said Luke Stillman, a managing director at research firm Madison and Wall.

Reddit isn’t alone in feeling the squeeze. Axios data cited by TheStreet shows visits to top US news sites down about 30% from their 2024 peak as AI answers replace traditional search results. Publishers and platforms that spent years optimizing for Google clicks are now watching the clicks disappear while Google keeps crawling their content just as hard as before.

Still, Reddit has something most publishers don’t: a logged-in audience that advertisers can actually target. If the login test converts even a fraction of its casual traffic into accounts, the company could come out with a smaller but more valuable user base. If it doesn’t, the fourth-quarter warning Huffman gave Wall Street could turn out to be optimistic.

For now, the test stays outside the US. Reddit says it will assess the impact in those markets before deciding on a wider rollout, which gives American users a reprieve but not a guarantee. Two decades of open browsing are ending, one market at a time.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Reddit requiring users to log in?

Reddit says Google’s AI search features have cut its referral traffic, with search referrals falling by more than 1 million a week on average in October. Requiring logins is meant to deter data scraping and turn casual visitors into signed-in users.

Is Reddit going logged-in only in the United States?

Not yet. Reddit will test the logged-in only experience in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter of 2026 and assess the impact before any wider rollout.

How much has Reddit’s Google search traffic fallen?

Search referrals fell by more than 1 million on average each week during October, and US daily active users fell 2% to 50.7 million, the first decline since Reddit went public in 2024.

What did Reddit’s CEO say about Google AI Mode?

CEO Steve Huffman said on the earnings call that AI Mode does not drive traffic, adding that Google used to be a traffic driver for Reddit and now it is not.

Sources: Reuters, Engadget, TheStreet