Adding 'Reddit' to your Google search could be a lot less useful now

Reddit is about to make the biggest change in its 20-year history: requiring you to log in. The website has always been a reliable source for finding crowdsourced answers to questions and discussions on practically any topic, and users have been able to browse them all without logging in. Now, Reddit will start requiring you to create an account and sign in to view content "in the coming months."

You might be used to adding "Reddit" to your search query as an easy way to surface answers that exist on Reddit in the results. Practically, this change means that adding that modifier to your Google searches will soon be a lot less useful if you don't want to go through the process of creating a Reddit account and logging in whenever you want to use the site.

In a post on Reddit , the company says it's making the move because it's "better for user experience, better for our ads business, is more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit data." Put simply, ads are generally more lucrative when delivered to logged-in users, and requiring people to sign in lets Reddit serve up more personalized ads based on a user's activity.

The most interesting part of Reddit's explanation, however, is the note about protecting Reddit data. Right now, anyone can "scrape" all of the website's posts and use the data to build their own tools — and AI is a big culprit of this. AI can ingest Reddit's content and use it to serve up answers without driving traffic to Reddit itself. You've probably encountered this already through Google's AI overviews, which now appear at the top of almost every search query.

Requiring users to log in to view posts will make data scraping much more difficult. It also allows Reddit to monetize its content more effectively by licensing it. "We will continue licensing our corpus intentionally, but those commercial deals come with guardrails that protect our users and our business," the company explained in its Reddit post. "Any commercial deals give us the right to say what the data can and can't be used for and how it's presented. Without those guardrails and that intentionality, we can't control who has access to Reddit data, where things go or what they're used for."

During its Q3 earnings call , Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman told shareholders that the website has seen a significant drop in traffic from search referrals, losing around one million per week on average. "The biggest impact was on logged-out and web traffic, but some of the impact flows through to logged-in and App traffic, since search referral is a common source of reengagement for users," Huffman said.

Reddit isn't alone in moving to lock down its content as AI becomes more common across online platforms. Websites are increasingly using tools to block AI training crawlers and automated scrapers to protect their content and revenue. The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft , arguing that millions of its articles were used to train AI that now competes with it.