What happened
On December 9, 2024, Reddit began publicly testing 'Reddit Answers,' a conversational AI search feature that responds to user questions with bullet-point summaries, tips, and quotes drawn from existing Reddit posts. Accessed via a new button on the homepage, the tool answers solely from content on Reddit rather than the broader web, and it is built on Reddit's existing search architecture using AI models from OpenAI and Google Cloud, an outgrowth of the company's data-licensing partnerships. The initial test reached a small portion of U.S. users in English on iOS and desktop, following about six months of internal testing.
Reddit framed the feature as 'building a bridge' to its content rather than a replacement for browsing, aiming to keep users on-platform as standalone AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly summarized Reddit discussions elsewhere. The launch reflected Reddit's broader strategy of capturing value from its own data while competing for the search and discovery traffic that generative AI was siphoning. The company said it planned to expand Reddit Answers to Android and additional languages over time.