Reddit search use jumped 30% as AI features begin to pay off

Reddit has spent years fielding complaints about a search function that users widely considered broken. The company began investing heavily in fixing it and then in building AI features on top of it. 

In Q1 2026, those bets produced their clearest result yet: weekly search users grew 30% year-on-year, CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday on the company's post-results conference call.

"Search DAUs, WAUs, and queries are up meaningfully year-over-year," Huffman told analysts. "It's a great driver of retention and DAUs." He pointed specifically to Reddit Answers the platform's AI-powered search feature as evidence of better integration into the broader product. The search team, he said, is "quite frankly doing a great job."

The test drive of product placement in Reddit's AI search results started in the United States back in February, indicating that search isn't only being used as a retention method anymore but as a monetisation avenue as well. 

According to Huffman, as many as 40% of all discussions on Reddit are business-oriented, with 84% of consumers admitting to making better buying decisions due to the research on the site.

Reddit ended Q1 2026 with more than 493 million weekly active unique users, a 23% increase from the same period a year earlier. Daily active unique users reached approximately 126 million, up 17% year-on-year. International growth is outpacing domestic expansion: international daily active users hit 73.3 million, up 26%, while US daily active users grew 7% to 53.5 million.

In addition to search, the newly launched machine translation system by Reddit which supports over 30 languages has become a key driver behind the growing international base of the platform in recent quarters.

It was reported by the company that its goal of hitting one billion daily active users globally and 100 million daily active users in the US relies heavily on both these initiatives paying off.

Reddit reported Q1 2026 revenue of $663 million, ahead of Wall Street's consensus estimate of $609.8 million. The company also disclosed capital expenditures of just $1 million for the quarter a figure that stands out sharply against the billions that cloud and AI infrastructure competitors are spending.