Reddit shares fall over 25% after CEO says Google referrals dropped by over one million per week in October, blames AI Mode

Reddit reported strong earnings, but its shares fell more than 25% after CEO Steve Huffman said the platform lost over one million weekly Google search referrals in October. He attributes the loss to Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Reddit is also testing login walls outside the U.S. to curb scraping and reduce reliance on the open web. Data licensing talks with AI providers continue, and no new deal has been confirmed. The source is a short secondary report from The Decoder, with no link to the earnings call or underlying traffic data.

If the figures hold, a large, well-known site is reporting a measurable loss of Google traffic, and investors reacted sharply. Publishers, forums and any business that relies on organic search have a concrete reason to check their own referral data month by month. The login-wall tests suggest Reddit may trade open access for control and licensing leverage, which could change how its content reaches both users and AI firms. The wider impact is uncertain, because this is one company's own account of one month's data.

The claim that AI Mode "does not drive traffic for anybody" and is a warning for the entire web is Huffman's view, not shown across other sites. The causal link between AI Mode and the referral drop is Reddit's own attribution, with no independent confirmation, and other factors such as ranking changes are not ruled out. The share fall is also hard to pin on traffic alone, since the report gives no detail on guidance, expectations or other drivers.

1. 01The earnings call transcript and shareholder letter: whether Reddit gives the referral figure as a share of total traffic, and how it describes the October decline.
2. 02Independent traffic data (Similarweb, Semrush, other publishers' search console reports) for November, to see whether other sites show similar Google referral drops.
3. 03Reddit's login-wall rollout and any announced AI data licensing deal, including its effect on logged-in users and revenue in the next quarterly report.