On Reddit's third-quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Steve Huffman said something every website owner should hear in his own words: "The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know. That's just a fundamental shift in how Google works. It used to be a traffic driver, now it's not."
This is not a small publisher complaining. Reddit is one of the most-visited websites on the internet, and for years it was one of Google's biggest winners - so much so that users started adding the word "Reddit" to searches to force Google to show human answers. And Reddit just reported that its search traffic dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week during October.
What Reddit actually reported
The numbers from the Q3 2026 earnings, as reported by TechCrunch and The Verge:
- Search referrals from Google fell by more than 1 million per week on average during October. Huffman attributes a significant part of it to AI Mode and AI Overviews changing the search experience.
- Global daily active users were flat at 130.3 million, but US daily users dropped from 53.2 million to 50.7 million in a single quarter. Reddit warned that if the trend continues, daily users could decline by a low-double-digit percentage next quarter.
- Huffman's blunt summary: AI Overviews and AI Mode now, at a "minimum," push "everyone down the search page."
- And yet: Reddit is still a top search term on Google, and Google is "crawling us as hard as ever." Demand for the content has not fallen. The clicks have.
Reddit's response is telling. The company is shifting to a primarily logged-in experience - partly to protect its data from AI scraping, partly to build a direct relationship with users it can no longer count on Google to deliver. It launched a personalised "For You" feed this week to become, in its own words, a "direct, sticky, daily destination."
Why this matters far beyond Reddit
Reddit has 130 million daily users, a data-licensing business, and a famous brand. If Google turning into an answer engine can pull a million weekly visits out from under Reddit, imagine what the same shift does to a chartered accountant in Noida, a coaching institute in Indirapuram, or a furniture manufacturer in Gurugram whose website traffic comes almost entirely from search.
The pattern is now consistent across the industry: AI summaries answer the question on the results page, users don't click through, and the websites that provided the answers get nothing. Even Google is feeling it - the company admitted this week that it sees "lower monetization" in AI Mode, which is precisely why it is expanding ads inside AI answers to more countries, including India (we covered that announcement yesterday).
What Indian small businesses should do about it
This is not a reason to abandon SEO. It is a reason to widen what "search marketing" means. Concretely:
- Optimise to be cited, not just ranked. AI answers pull from pages that state facts clearly, answer specific questions, and show real expertise. Vague, keyword-stuffed pages are invisible to both the old and the new Google.
- Win the searches AI can't answer. "Best dentist near me," "AC repair Vaishali price," "CA for GST filing Noida" - local, transactional searches still send real visitors. Your Google Business Profile and local SEO matter more than ever.
- Build traffic you own. Reddit's pivot to logged-in users is the same advice at giant scale: an email list, a WhatsApp broadcast list, and customers who type your name directly cannot be taken away by an algorithm change.
- Measure brand search, not just total traffic. If more people search your business name directly each month, your marketing is working even while generic clicks shrink.
The honest takeaway
The open web's deal with Google - you create content, Google sends visitors - is being rewritten in real time. The businesses that will come out ahead are the ones that treat this as a channel shift, not a catastrophe: keep doing SEO, but stop depending on it alone.
If your website traffic has been quietly sliding this year and you are not sure whether it's AI search, your rankings, or something else, that is exactly the kind of diagnosis we do. VAIR IT Technologies offers a free consultation - we will look at your actual traffic data, tell you honestly what is causing the decline, and map out what to fix first. Reach us at vairit.com/contact.
