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In the past few years, Reddit’s place in the media industry has undergone a dramatic shift. Once regarded primarily as an unruly forum for toxic discourse, it is now a consequential player in the evolving relationship between tech platforms and media companies.
That’s partly because Reddit has offered itself up as a vital supplier of data for AI companies. In February 2024, the same day it filed for an IPO, the company announced a content-licensing deal with Google for sixty million dollars a year. The agreement gave Google access to real-time content from Reddit’s vast user-authored forums. A few months later, Reddit struck a similar partnership with OpenAI that is estimated to be worth around seventy million a year.
These deals mean that when people search for content online, Reddit surfaces more often. The analytics platform Profound showed that, between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit was the most cited domain by Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the second most cited by ChatGPT. Also, an update to Google’s algorithm that boosted forums like Quora and Reddit in its search rankings nearly tripled Reddit’s readership between August 2023 and April 2024, from 132 million to 346 million visitors.
The surge has prompted news publishers that have historically been wary of Reddit to launch or revive their accounts. Puck and New York Times Opinion launched new accounts, while Rolling Stone, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Associated Press, and Newsweek ramped up existing accounts. Chartbeat reported that its seven hundred US news publisher clients saw an 88 percent increase in page views from Reddit between January 2023 and August 2024.
For news publishers, promoting articles on Reddit requires more careful navigation of community norms than other social platforms, but the payoff can be worth the effort. As Taylor Lorenz wrote in the Washington Post in 2023, “News organizations can’t just post to a central homepage. They must seek out specific subreddits and cultivate relationships within those groups to be allowed to promote stories there.” Digiday’s Kayleigh Barber wrote last year that promotion on Reddit requires “knowing when and where to post, maintaining relationships with subreddit moderators, and, ultimately, keeping their brands in subreddit communities’ good graces.” This can work both ways. In February, for example, moderators of r/LosAngeles banned links from the LA Times amid controversy over the paper’s editorial direction. On the flip side, Joshi Herrmann, founder of UK-based Mill Media, said that the overlap between local Reddit communities and his readership makes the platform valuable for funneling those people into mailing lists that might eventually convert into paid subscriptions.
Reddit has also been courting publishers with new features, including a new AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) format, an analytics dashboard, and an improved embed product. In September, it began beta testing tools to allow publishers to track story sharing and engagement, to automatically import articles to the platform, and to suggest subreddits to target. The company is also testing in-app articles.
Reddit’s entanglement with AI brings complications, of course. Google sometimes ranks Reddit threads over original content sources, killing traffic to news sites. And Reddit’s prominence in AI training data means that shitposts can be sucked up and spit out disguised as information, such as the infamous example of Google AI Overviews generating a pizza recipe with glue in it. Some Reddit threads are now flooded with “parasite SEO,” or AI-generated posts by brands that hope to improve their own visibility.
Despite being the top-cited domain in AI-generated answers, Reddit is not immune to the broader declines in traffic caused by AI search. Perhaps in response, the company launched its own conversational search tool, powered by Google Gemini’s model, called Reddit Answers. CEO Steve Huffman told investors in June that the company aims to make Reddit “a go-to search engine.”
At the same time, Reddit is tightening control over its data. Last summer, it made updates to block most automated crawlers, requiring AI companies to secure licensing agreements like those it has with Google and OpenAI. In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging that it had scraped the site more than a hundred thousand times even after claiming to stop. By August, Reddit had even restricted the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from crawling most of its pages, to prevent AI firms from scraping archived content.
In September, Reddit joined Yahoo, Medium, People Inc., and other companies in backing Really Simple Licensing (RSL), which aims to standardize how AI developers license content and compensate publishers. Modeled after music industry frameworks like ASCAP and BMI, RSL creates a clearinghouse where publishers can set payment terms and attribution requirements. As María Garcia of Implicator.ai noted, “Reddit alone receives an estimated $60 million annually from Google for training data access, yet still backs RSL—suggesting that even publishers with existing deals see value in standardized pricing.” No major AI companies have yet committed to honoring the standard.
Meanwhile, Reddit is preparing for its next round of negotiations with Google. According to Bloomberg, the company is proposing an arrangement that would encourage Google users to contribute to Reddit’s forums, so Google traffic could help generate content for future training. Executives are also floating a dynamic pricing model “where the social platform can be paid more as it becomes more vital to AI answers.” It seems that while Reddit has the upper hand, it is intent on developing creative strategies to maintain its relevance in the AI era and not be caught with a dead-end licensing deal.
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