Reddit will eventually require every visitor to log in, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed this week, as the platform tries to counter a sharp drop in traffic from people who find its pages through search engines without ever creating an account.
Huffman disclosed the plan in a letter to shareholders accompanying Reddit's third-quarter results, writing that the company is shifting "to a logged-in-only experience." He framed the change as good for users and for the business alike: it would let Reddit "find the content and communities most relevant" to each visitor, generate "more signals for ads targeting," and "protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data" — a reference to the data licensing deals Reddit has struck with AI companies.
Search Traffic Is Sliding
The shift comes as referrals from search engines, long one of Reddit's biggest sources of visitors, have weakened. Huffman wrote that search referral traffic "was down meaningfully" in the third quarter, with the steepest declines among logged-out, web-based visitors, and that the trend has continued into the current quarter. "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," he wrote, warning that if the pace continues, total daily active users could fall by a low-double-digit percentage from the company's current base of roughly 130 million.
Reddit will begin testing the login requirement in select non-US markets this quarter before deciding what a fully logged-in version of the site should look like worldwide, Huffman said. "Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition," he added. "We are excited and moving quickly."
The move is the latest in a string of changes that have made it progressively harder to use Reddit anonymously or through outside tools: the company made its API prohibitively expensive for most third-party apps in 2024, began requiring logins for Old Reddit in July, and has been testing a login wall for desktop browsing since at least August. Huffman noted that only about 13 percent of eligible mobile web users currently see a prompt pushing them toward Reddit's own app, suggesting the company has considerable room to tighten that funnel further.
Taken together, the changes point toward a Reddit that knows far more about who is reading it and why — useful both for selling advertising and for controlling how outside companies scrape its forums for AI training data, a business Reddit has leaned on increasingly as a revenue source since going public.