Reddit is preparing to end two decades of anonymous browsing. On its third-quarter earnings call on October 29, CEO Steve Huffman said the company will move to a predominantly logged-in experience, testing the requirement in select markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter before a possible wider rollout. The trigger, Huffman said, is Google’s AI search features, which he blamed for a steep decline in referral traffic. Reddit shares fell 18% in extended trading after the warning, according to Reuters.

What Reddit announced

The change would make Reddit logins mandatory for most browsing, ending roughly 20 years of open access. Huffman told analysts that Reddit will “fully test” a logged-in-only experience in international markets starting this quarter and use the results to shape a global version. The company would require sign-ins for most content, closing off the anonymous reading the site has allowed for roughly 20 years. He framed the change as both a defense against data scraping and a pivot toward direct relationships with visitors, telling CNBC that “Reddit is the last platform to provide basically unfettered logged-out access, and that’s largely because of me, I’ve been holding that line,” per Skimwire’s summary of the call.

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The numbers behind the warning

Search engine referrals to Reddit decreased by more than one million on average each week during October, Huffman said, a slide that accelerated late in the third quarter. If the decline continues, he warned, total daily active unique visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter from a base of about 130 million.

The damage is already showing in the reported figures. US daily active uniques, or DAUq, slipped 2% to 50.7 million, the first decline since Reddit went public in 2024. Global DAUq rose 12% from a year earlier to 130.3 million but was flat compared with the prior quarter and missed the 133.7 million analyst estimate. Logged-in users totaled just 53.5 million, less than half of the total, according to TheStreet’s breakdown of the shareholder letter.

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Why AI search is the trigger

Huffman pinned the drop on Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, which answer questions directly on the results page instead of sending users onward. “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,” he said on the post-earnings call, as quoted by Reuters.

Reddit is not alone in feeling the squeeze. Axios data cited in the same coverage shows visits to top US news sites are down about 30% from their 2024 peak, a sign that AI-powered answers are reshaping how the web distributes attention, and the advertising revenue that follows it.

The scraping fight

The login requirement also serves a second purpose: deterring data scrapers. Reddit already licenses its data to OpenAI and Google, and it has sued IPO-bound Anthropic, Perplexity AI and three data scraping companies, accusing them of illegally collecting Reddit’s content. Huffman expects total daily users and logged-in users to roughly converge over time, he told a Wedbush analyst, per TheStreet.

Analysts caution the fix has costs of its own. “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, quoted by Reuters.

What happens next

Reddit has not named the test markets or set a date for a wider launch, saying it will assess the Q4 trials first, according to BetaNews. The experiment makes Reddit the clearest test case yet of a publisher response to the AI search era: trade open distribution for logged-in loyalty, and hope the people who come back directly are worth more than the ones Google used to send.

Sources