After being plagued by complaints that its search function needed improvement, Reddit has invested in its search engine over the past few years, and has also added AI features to help its users find what they are looking for. It appears the investment is finally paying off: CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday that the company has seen a 30% year-over-year increase in the number of people using search each week.
Huffman said search has been one of the key drivers of user acquisition and retention for the platform.
“On search, we’ve seen great performance. Search DAU, WAU and queries are growing meaningfully year-over-year. That’s a great driver of retention and DAU. The search team, quite frankly, I think is doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see it’s better integrated into the product,” he said on a conference call following the company’s first-quarter results.
Earlier in February, the platform began testing product placement through AI search results in the US
Huffman said that about 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% of shoppers feel more confident in their purchasing decisions after doing research on Reddit.
The social platform ended the quarter with more than 493 million weekly active unique users (WAUQ), up 23% from the same period last year, and nearly 126 million daily active unique users (DAUQ), a 17% improvement from a year ago.
Reddit recorded a 7% improvement in US visitors, reaching 53.5 million DAUq, and 73.3 million DAUq internationally, an increase of 26%. The company said it plans to reach one billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the US
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In addition to search, the company said its machine translation feature, which now supports more than 30 languages, has driven significant user growth over the past few quarters.
Reddit reported revenue of $663 million in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding Wall Street’s expectations of $609.8 million. The company also said it spent just $1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.
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