Reddit says falling search referrals could cut its daily users in the fourth quarter

Reddit's audience stopped growing in the third quarter, and the company says it could shrink in the fourth. Daily active uniques, Reddit's main measure of its users, averaged 130.3 million in the three months to September 30, the same as in the second quarter and 12% more than a year earlier, the company said on October 29, 2026. In the U.S., the figure fell 5% from the second quarter and 2% from a year earlier.

Reddit pointed to search engines. Its search referral traffic was “down meaningfully” in the quarter, with the decline speeding up toward the end, co-founder and chief executive Steve Huffman wrote in the shareholder letter. In October, search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average, he said, and if that pace continues, total daily users “could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage” from 130 million.

Where the users are

Growth now comes from outside the U.S., where daily users rose 24% from a year earlier and 3% from the second quarter. In its quarterly filing, Reddit says the yearly growth came mainly from marketing spending, partly offset by changes at third-party search engines, and that the flat quarter came as marketing gains were offset “predominantly by third-party search engine changes.” In the U.S., the number has fallen in both quarters since it reached 53.5 million in the first quarter of 2026.

Logged-in users, which Reddit calls its most engaged and monetizable, grew 7% from a year earlier. Huffman wrote that logged-in and app users both grew from the second quarter and account for over 80% of Reddit's monetization. Reddit had said it would stop reporting its logged-in and logged-out split this quarter; it kept it, saying in its filing that the growing use of artificial intelligence to generate summaries and overviews in third-party search had made referral traffic more volatile.

A logged-in Reddit

Huffman's answer is to make Reddit a place people visit directly rather than through search. Reddit will shift to a logged-in-only experience and will begin fully testing it in select markets outside the U.S. in the fourth quarter, he wrote, saying it gives users more relevant content, gives Reddit more signals for ad targeting and protects access to its data. Only about 13% of eligible mobile web users currently see a prompt to move to the app, he added. Reddit is also rolling out separate For You and Following feeds (see our report).

Revenue still rising

So far, the money keeps growing. Revenue rose 53% to $895 million and net income 74% to $283 million. Reddit's filing says the price of its ads rose about 34% from a year earlier and the number of ad impressions about 15%. For the fourth quarter, Reddit forecasts revenue of $1,000 million to $1,030 million.

Search is also the subject of a lawsuit. Since June 2025, Reddit and some of its officers and directors have faced a securities class action alleging false or misleading statements about the impact of Google Search and its AI Overviews feature on the business. The court dismissed the amended complaint on August 13, 2026, with leave to amend, and the plaintiffs filed a second amended complaint on October 23, according to Reddit's filing, which says the outcome remains uncertain.