Reddit is in an “arms race” to protect its devoted online communities from a surge in artificial intelligence-generated content, with the authenticity of its vast repository of human interaction increasingly valuable in training new AI-powered search tools.
Chief executive Steve Huffman told the Financial Times that Reddit had “20 years of conversation about everything”, leaving the company with a lucrative resource of personal interaction.
This has allowed it to strike multimillion dollar partnerships with Google and OpenAI to train their large language models on its content, as tech companies look for real-world data that can improve their generative AI products.
But Huffman said Reddit was now battling to ensure its users stay at the centre of the social network. “Where the rest of the internet seems to be powered by or written by or summarised by AI, Reddit is distinctly human,” he said. “It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity.”
As Reddit becomes an increasingly important source for LLMs, advertisers are responding with what one agency chief described as a “massive migration” to the platform.
Multiple advertising and agency executives speaking during this month’s Cannes advertising festival told the FT that brands were increasingly exploring hosting a business account and posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.
However, Huffman warned against any company seeking to game the site with fake or AI-generated content, with plans to bring in strict verification checks to ensure that only humans can post to its forums.
“For 20 years, we’ve been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit,” he said. “We index very well into the search engines. If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it’s the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit.”
For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are “written by humans and voted on by humans” — referencing the process by which users can “upvote” posts in order to show their appreciation or “downvote” those they find unhelpful.
“It’s an arms race, it’s a never ending battle”, he said. “The AI version of it, it’s a new frontier in the same battle that we’ve been fighting for a long time.”
Huffman said Reddit would still not require users to post under their real names — one of the defining features of the site — but the group would seek to use services that will provide verification “you’re a human without knowing your name”.
Reddit is exploring using World ID, the eyeball-scanning technology from Sam Altman’s Worldcoin venture, as a way to verify users while granting them anonymity, according to a person familiar with the talks and first reported by Semafor. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, used to sit on Reddit’s board.
“Human verification is top of mind for us right now. Over the rest of this year, we’ll be evolving that — it’s a need on the internet broadly”, Huffman said.
Reddit is protecting the value of its content in other ways. Last month it sued AI start-up Anthropic in San Francisco, claiming it had scraped its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024. “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” Anthropic said.
Huffman said there are “a few cases where people have taken advantage of Reddit content, and we’re working through those moments”.
Huffman’s comments come as Reddit seeks to woo brands with new advertising tools and features. This month, it launched two AI-powered products to provide marketers with real-time data on trending conversations and showcase positive user-generated content underneath real adverts.
Reddit now has more than 100,000 communities based around topic and interest. Reddit’s commercial pitch is that many of these conversations — about 40 per cent — are about a service or a product, and within this a quarter relate to some sort of recommendation.
But several agency executives told the FT that Reddit’s advertising offering still needed fine-tuning, particularly around user targeting.
Reddit is also improving its platform for users, with an AI-powered search that provides verbatim quotes from its communities and new translation tools to extend its site to 13 languages later this year, including Korean and Japanese.
Huffman said the platform was now “much more than what we could have imagined 20 years ago” when he co-founded the site with a college friend. Huffman left Reddit in 2009 after it was acquired by Condé Nast, but returned in 2015 when the site faced potential collapse following widespread user dissent over toxic posts and harmful content.
At the time, Reddit had 12mn daily users and revenue of $15mn. A decade later, it has reached more than 100mn daily average users and is turning over more than $1.3bn.
Reddit floated in March 2024 with a valuation of $6.4bn, which has grown to $26bn despite a fall in its stock in recent months over concerns that search traffic will be hit with the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews — answers to search queries that remove the need for users to click through to its web pages.
Huffman said he was relaxed about the longer term impact of Google Overview removing the need for people to click through to Reddit links.
The “majority of our traffic comes directly to Reddit” rather than through Google, he said, adding that “the search ecosystem is evolving, and it’s volatile right now, but that also opens the door for other players in search, including Reddit”.
