Reddit to require login for most browsing due to AI search changes

Reddit announced it will soon require users to log in for the majority of browsing activities. The company cited a decline in traffic from search engines as a primary driver for this shift.

CEO Steve Huffman noted that Google’s “AI Overviews” feature has fundamentally altered the relationship between search engines and the web, as the tool provides answers directly to users rather than driving traffic to external sites. This change follows a period of rapid growth for Reddit, where traffic from Google searches increased by 39% between May 2023 and May 2024.

The platform’s content has become highly valuable for training artificial intelligence models, which require large amounts of human-generated text. However, Reddit faces challenges regarding intellectual property and compensation, as AI companies can utilize its data without providing equivalent traffic or advertising revenue back to the platform.