How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman got the upper hand with AI
Last fall, Chives took over Reddit.
It started when a cook who belonged to the massive social site’s r/kitchenconfidential community pledged to practice his chive-cutting skills every day and post photos so that others could rate his technique. Thousands among the group’s 1.8 million weekly visitors weighed in, and soon he became known as “Chivelord.”
All went well until day 31, when a commenter claimed that the latest image he’d posted was the same as the one from day 23, only flipped. A scandal—known, inevitably, as Chivegate—boiled over.
Chivelord confessed to the subterfuge, explaining that car troubles had prevented him from cutting chives that day. He was widely forgiven and resumed posting photos. Eventually, his redemption was cemented by an ad that Kraft’s Philadelphia brand ran on Reddit. “Some heroes chop chives every day until Reddit says they’re perfect,” it read. “We whip ours into cream cheese.”
The incident was fascinating, funny, and, above all, human—in other words, classic Reddit. Among those watching and marveling was the company’s CEO, Steve Huffman. No one could have predicted, he says, that “for whatever reason, everybody who uses Reddit was going to care about chives for the next two months. But I think those things are really delightful.”
Serendipitous weirdness has been core to Reddit’s character since Huffman and Alexis Ohanian cofounded the site in 2005. But along the way, their brainchild also grew up into something far greater. Reddit has become the internet’s indispensable wellspring of advice, opinion, and camaraderie on every topic imaginable: which new EVs are most exciting, how to find a job overseas, where to recycle scrap metal, what to do if your boyfriend is jealous of your pet fish. Helping people help other people has made Reddit the fifth-most-visited site in the United States and the eighth worldwide as of January, according to market intelligence firm Similarweb.
Lately, it’s also made for a burgeoning financial success story. Since the company’s March 2024 initial public offering, Reddit has beaten analyst expectations in every quarter, most recently by reporting Q4 2025 revenue of $726 million and net income of $252 million, up 70% and 254% year over year, respectively. For 2025 in total, revenue grew 69% to $2.2 billion; net income swung to $530 million from a $484 million loss. Those numbers are overwhelmingly attributable to Reddit’s growing skill in selling ads on its site, the source of 94% of its revenue.
Reddit is already so well established, popular, and increasingly adept at convincing marketers of its audience’s worth that you might wonder how much it has left to prove. As Huffman sees it, quite a lot. “We’ve got a home for everybody on Reddit,” he says. “Does the average person, when they open the app for the first time, believe and experience that? I think there’s a gap there.”
The platform is hardly running short on new visitors. Its 471.6 million weekly active users represent 24% year-over-year growth. But U.S. logged-in users—the committed fans especially prized by marketers—increased by only 5%, continuing six quarters of slowing growth.
Reddit is heavily dependent on traffic from Google, with which it signed a data licensing agreement on the cusp of its IPO: The search behemoth prioritizes Reddit pages in results and sends Reddit 56% of all its visitors, according to Similarweb. Those who head directly to Reddit or the Reddit app account for just 35% of Reddit’s overall visits but the majority of time spent and ad revenue.
Wall Street’s fear that Reddit might be maxing out its potential to add truly engaged users is reflected in its recent stock price, which slipped by 7.4% after it announced those stellar Q4 results, part of a year-to-date decline of 34% through late February. Along with revealing a $1 billion stock buyback, the company said during its earnings call that it would soon stop breaking out statistics for logged-in/logged-out users—making it a whole lot harder for investors to obsess over them.
So yes, Reddit must demonstrate its ability to turn a considerably larger quantity of potentially transient Reddit newbies into happy Reddit stalwarts. “The question is whether [Reddit is] perceived as a niche portion of the social landscape, or whether they can do something that’s bigger,” says Andrew Boone, managing director and equity research analyst at Citizens. “We think that they can continue to grow in a healthy fashion.”
Ultimately, “Reddit’s biggest challenge and biggest opportunity are the same: How do they get more people into the conversation?” says Y Combinator partner emeritus Michael Seibel, who replaced Ohanian on Reddit’s board in 2020.
Making it easy for everyone to find their home on the platform, new users and advertisers included, has been the driving force behind Reddit’s recent initiatives. It has helped focus the company’s use of AI on its platform, which started ramping up in earnest in late 2024 and now “permeates everything we do,” says COO Jen Wong. Getting that balance right, between AI optimization and the human touch Reddit is known for, isn’t just about ensuring the company’s continued financial health. It also protects a stronghold of person-to-person connection at a time when machine-generated slop threatens to crowd humanity off the internet.
Though Reddit is undeniably social, it’s never much resembled social networking in its conventional form. Rather than emphasizing friendships or followers, its organizing principle is its 100,000-plus topic-specific communities, known as subreddits. Managed with extraordinary autonomy by unpaid moderators, these groups are free to develop their own rules and cultures.
This institutionalized decentralization is crucial to the site’s appeal. But it also frustrates any attempt to treat it like one giant repository of chatter that can be turned into an algorithm-powered virality machine.
“There’s all of these subreddits that never percolate up to the top and aren’t on the front page, but they’re still robust, sustainable communities that hundreds of thousands or millions of people participate in,” says Elliot Panek, a University of Alabama associate professor and the author of Understanding Reddit. “That sets [Reddit] apart from some other platforms, where what’s trending is what a lot of people see.”
It’s not that things don’t trend on Reddit. Twenty-one years ago, Huffman and Ohanian’s founding idea was to let users curate the internet by voting news items up and down. That goal eventually translated into a subreddit called r/popular, a list of the posts that had racked up the most clicks on their Upvote button. It became the default feed that new members saw upon landing on the site.
Strength in Numbers: Reddit has a firm pull on advertisers, and it’s only been getting more powerful
But mere clickiness has never been synonymous with relevance, let alone quality, and Huffman looks slightly distressed just talking about r/popular, which he says has long represented Reddit’s lowest common denominator. “At this point, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t appeal to anybody,” he argues. “In fact, I think it’s actively off-putting to almost everybody, and it’s certainly not representative of Reddit overall.”
In December, Huffman announced—via a Reddit post, naturally—that the company was preparing to oust r/popular from its prime real estate. The goal is to usher new homepage visitors toward the subreddits they’re most likely to find rewarding.
But how? Even newer arrivals who haven’t yet signed up for an account or subscribed to any subreddits provide clues to their interests each time they click on a link on Reddit. The company is applying AI to such signals to more quickly populate its homepages with a personalized feed. Moreover, about half of first-time visitors explicitly tell Reddit what they’re looking for by using its search feature.
That led the company to come up with its own AI-powered feature, Reddit Answers, an all-new way to explore the site’s trove of conversations and discover subreddits. Prototyped by a small team, launched as a preview in late 2024, and now widely available but still officially in beta, the feature provides a few sample queries to convey the possibilities. (On one recent day, they included “best hip-hop tracks of all time,” “should I finance or lease a car,” “best bath towels,” and “favorite bourbon cocktails.”) Results are presented as bullet-point lists, mostly consisting of sound bites from Reddit posts.
AI assistants are notorious for overconfidence, behaving as if questions have one true answer and sometimes offering up ones that aren’t true at all. By training Reddit Answers on the site’s own corpus of material, the company greatly minimizes hallucinations. But it also avoids boiling its answers down too much. As Huffman explains it, Reddit’s forte is fielding questions that lack definitive answers: “What should I watch tonight—what movie, what show? What game should I play next? What should I wear? Where should I go?”
If anything, “the joy of Reddit is in the messiness of the answer, that there’s a whole bunch of different users who have different opinions,” says CTO Chris Slowe, who joined the company in 2005 as its first engineer. (Like Huffman, he left and worked on travel site Hipmunk for a few years, then boomeranged back.) Rather than supplanting conversation threads, the feature is designed to be a convenient new gateway to them.
Reddit has been gradually raising the profile of Reddit Answers, which it is currently testing on its homepage in several variants, such as an “Ask” button. In its first year, the feature’s audience grew to 15 million visitors per week. That’s still dinky compared to the more than 80 million who use Reddit’s conventional search, let alone the 472 million who visit the site each week—most of whom aren’t searching it at all.
Still, Reddit is betting on the feature. Over time, Huffman says, the distinction between Reddit Answers and its existing search options will likely blur. During Reddit’s Q4 earnings call, he also talked about giving this new AI-infused tool something no Reddit search feature has had to date—ads, which he called “an enormous market and opportunity.” Like Google and OpenAI, the company could run ads precisely targeted to the questions users ask of its AI answer engine.
AI is also helping Reddit boost its international usage. (Currently, 57% of visitors are from outside the U.S., a low percentage for a site of its size.) More than 90% of the platform’s content is written in English, but the company supports 35 languages through machine learning and has translated a billion posts out of its total of 22 billion. Slowe wants to reach the point where two Reddit users who don’t share a language can converse seamlessly. He calls the prospect “fantastic and beautiful.”
On the advertising side, too, the company is betting on AI as an accelerant. Last June, it unveiled Reddit Community Intelligence, a portfolio of marketing tools trained on Reddit posts. They include the ability to dynamically complement ads with related posts from Reddit users—positive ones, naturally—and campaigns that automate the selection and rotation of specific ads, which users are targeted, and how budgets are allocated.
Marketers who might once have shied away from Reddit’s freewheeling atmosphere are summoning the courage to dive in, as witnessed by Philadelphia’s commandeering of the Chivelord saga. “Brands are starting to realize that they need to be on Reddit, not just as a paid customer, but to have an organic existence, talking to their customers, having a place to call their headquarters online,” says Huffman.
Given the unvarnished nature of Reddit conversations, having a thick skin helps. “What I often tell [marketers] is, ‘Look, you can’t manipulate that opinion,’ ” says COO Wong, who joined the company in 2018, well before it had fleshed out its business model. “But you can always talk to it.”
Regardless of how adroitly Reddit wields AI to benefit users and advertisers, the technology continues to affect its business in ways beyond its control. In the wake of ChatGPT’s November 2022 debut, it was obvious that Reddit was one of the internet’s richest veins of AI training data and that LLM purveyors were helping themselves to it without asking permission or offering compensation. The company quickly formulated the strategy it continues to follow: Pay us, or take a hike.
In 2024, it struck licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI that, though strategically important, represent a small percentage of revenue. (They roll up under Reddit’s “other” revenue category, which also includes premium subscriptions and a virtual currency called Reddit Gold and amounted to just $140 million in 2025, 6% of the total.) As Citizens’ Boone notes, the company could use upcoming renewal negotiations for its Google and OpenAI contracts to wangle more favorable placement for its content or simply demand more money.
Even before lining up these partnerships, Reddit had begun aggressively blocking unwanted visitors from helping themselves to its data by accessing its API fire hose or scraping its site. Last year, it took this battle to court by filing suits against Anthropic and Perplexity—both based less than a mile from its own headquarters in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood—as well as several little-known resellers of AI training fodder.
In legal filings oozing with snark, Reddit accused these companies of using duplicitous methods to procure its content, thereby violating its intellectual property rights and invading its users’ privacy. Did it try to broker licensing agreements with them before suing? “Oh my gosh, yes,” says Huffman. “We got to a point where there’s no deal to be done, because you can’t do a deal with somebody you don’t trust.”
According to Huffman, the company remains open to collaborating with additional AI companies, but it has gotten pickier. “Two years ago, our conversations were more, ‘Okay, you’ve got our data—let’s formalize these relationships,’ ” he says. “Now it’s, ‘Here’s what we need out of these relationships. We want to make the Reddit flywheel go faster. We want more people to discover their home on Reddit. Does the product you’re building fit into that?’ ”
It’s tough to imagine any other platform emerging to fill the role Reddit has played in training AI on so many subjects of interest to human beings. (In an intriguing twist, Ohanian is one of the investors behind a new version of Digg, once Reddit’s most obvious rival, that recently launched but then pressed pause after being overwhelmed by AI and bots.) “I don’t think that people really know how to create places where people feel comfortable sharing their opinions and talking to one another,” says board member Seibel. “So if anything, I think the LLMs are going to become more and more reliant on Reddit.”
One dire scenario involves assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini becoming so good at their jobs that engaging directly with other people starts to feel superfluous. It’s not an entirely idle concern. In December, Stack Overflow, a 17-year-old Reddit-esque community for programmers and other technologists, saw a 78% year-over-year plunge in questions asked, seemingly stemming from AI’s increasing competence as a coding assistant. (Like Reddit, the site has a data deal with OpenAI.)
The more immediate threat could be AI-generated slop invading the platform, degrading the authenticity that has served it so well and damaging its usefulness for training purposes. The company has two decades of experience fighting earlier forms of spam and is planning tougher anti-bot measures: In instances when a poster shows signs of being a bot, Huffman says, “ass in seat” verification using biometric tools such as Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID might confirm—anonymously—that they’re human.
Ultimately, though, Reddit’s best defense could be its members and moderators—many of whom have already banned AI-generated content from their subreddits. “At least in the subreddits that I’ve seen, if people don’t like [AI content], they downvote it, and that kind of makes the point moot,” says Understanding Reddit author Panek.
If there’s a tension between Reddit’s two personas today—AI player and hangout for millions of people who crave honest conversation—so be it. The duality is unavoidable, and the company seems to have found its footing in this new era. It knows what it is, which is more than you can say for many venerable businesses feeling their way through this transformational technological moment.
“Maybe it’s a paradox,” Huffman muses. “Reddit is fuel for this AI, but the Reddit product and experience is for humans. It’s for people to talk to other people about things they care about. That’s where we are—but also where we need to go.”
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