Reddit has announced it will shift to a primarily logged-in experience, marking one of the most significant changes in its 21-year history as AI-powered search drains traffic from the open web.
This means Reddit wants most people to use the platform while signed in to a Reddit account instead of browsing anonymously as a visitor who arrives via a Google search or a shared link.
Under the shift, logged-out users would see a restricted version of Reddit, likely just the homepage and the specific content they clicked on, while features like voting, commenting, subscribing, and personalised feeds would require an account.
As per the company, there are three primary reasons driving this move, i.e., protecting its data from AI scraping, better ad targeting, and higher engagement.
Reddit’s content will provide valuable training data for the AI models. Having a logged-in wall will make mass scraping much more difficult and strengthen Reddit’s negotiating position when dealing with the licensing of its content to AI companies.Â
Signals of logged-in users will allow Reddit to personalise advertisements and make money from that. As Huffman explained, over 80% of Reddit’s monetisation is done through the app and logged-in users.
The search traffic is plummeting. Reddit reported referrals were down by over 1 million per week on average in October, mainly due to Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode that answer questions without redirecting users to websites. Daily active US users are down by 2% year-over-year to 50.7 million, and Reddit predicts “a low double-digit percentage” decrease next quarter.
Reddit plans to try out the logged-in experience in Q4 in certain countries outside of the US market, but no information was provided regarding any timeframe on a global scale.
