I was walking over to take the stage at SMMW 2026 in Anaheim, California, last Thursday, listening intently to Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit, talk about the last quarter at Reddit, but more importantly, to get a sense of what the focus would be for the rest of the year.
Question after question, I saw a story unfolding that hadn’t been there in the last few earnings calls, one that had less to do with ad revenue and AI deals than with the underlying changes Reddit is making to the platform itself.
Those changes matter if you’re trying to build organic presence on Reddit, connect with a community, or get cited in AI answers.
OGS Media works closely with Reddit, testing new features, contributing to r/redditforbusiness, and other aspects we’re working on behind closed doors. But I’ve also been on Reddit for 20 years and have been watching these earnings calls since the IPO. This one was different and stood out to me.
The headlines you’ll see are all about ad revenue up 74%, DAU at 126.8 million, and the AI partnership pricing question Rich Greenfield asked Steve. All real, all interesting.
But Steve and Jen Wong spent more of this call than any I can remember talking about things Reddit doesn’t always publicly emphasize. They talked about the value of real human connection, about making sure every view on the platform is valuable enough that an ad next to it carries weight, and about how it’s still too hard for normal people to participate on Reddit in the first place.
None of that is new internally. If you’ve worked closely with Reddit’s teams for any length of time, you’ve heard most of it. The new thing is that they’re saying it on an earnings call, in front of investors, with their name on it. That’s a different signal entirely.
The Growth Math Isn’t Speculative
When Steve said the goal is 100 million daily U.S. users, the headline writes itself. The math underneath it is what brands should actually pay attention to.
Reddit is sitting at 50 million daily and 200 million weekly users in the U.S. right now. So the 100 million target isn’t a go-find-new-users problem, it’s a convert-weekly-into-daily problem. The audience is already there.
For perspective, Reddit was at 12 million daily users 10 years ago. Going from 50 to 100 million is a smaller stretch than what they’ve already pulled off, and they did most of that growth before AI search was a meaningful tailwind. The headline number sounds aspirational, but the math says it’s the next obvious step.
Steve also dropped a stat that caught my attention and was validating. When you look at how often Reddit users come back, the two biggest groups are people who use Reddit one day a week and people who use it all seven, with everything in the middle being smaller. His phrasing was that once they have you, they have you, which I think is exactly right.
For brands trying to decide whether Reddit is worth investing in, this is the math that matters. The audience isn’t a casual scroll, it’s a high-engagement community of people spending serious time. That’s a different value proposition than reach-based platforms, and it’s why Reddit content keeps outperforming what most brands can do on their own sites.
The Barriers Are Coming Down
The most important development from this earnings call for organic marketers is that Reddit is finally addressing the karma wall problem in public. It’s something we’ve been giving Reddit feedback on for over a year through our partnership.
Karma walls and age gates have made it nearly impossible for new accounts to participate in the subreddits that actually matter. If you tried to build a real Reddit presence in 2025, you hit this every day, with new employee accounts who couldn’t post and mods who, completely understandably, didn’t trust any new account because the spam problem was that bad.
Steve said it directly on the call. Reddit is “working our way out of age and Karma limits with better AI-powered spam protection to help protect communities from bad new users like spammers, but be welcoming to good new users.”
This matters more than it sounds. Reddit has been working on this internally for over a year, and a lot of the patterns OGS sees in client work feed back into those conversations. Steve saying it publicly on an earnings call is a different signal entirely. It means the work is close enough to ship that they’re willing to put their name on it in front of investors.
That’s not Reddit testing whether to do something. That’s Reddit telling you it’s coming.
Making It Easier To Start A Community
This is a related but separate barrier from the karma walls, and it actually matters more for brands trying to build something serious on Reddit.
Steve talked about Reddit needing to focus on what they’re calling community success, basically how easy it is to create and grow a community on the platform. He was clear this isn’t only an international issue, it includes the U.S.
This is something we run into on every brand engagement. If a brand wants to launch its own subreddit, the natural pattern is to create the brand account, create the subreddit, and start posting content to fill it. That content is going to be about the brand’s product or category, because that’s the whole point of the community.
The problem is that the pattern looks almost identical to what spammers and manipulators do when they’re trying to game Reddit for search or LLM citations. They create the account, create the subreddit, post the content, all from the same source, all about one topic. Reddit’s defenses are designed to catch exactly that, and for good reason.
But when Brand X does the same thing legitimately, they can get caught in the same net, even though they’re not breaking any rules, and this is genuinely how a real community gets started. There isn’t another way to launch a brand community on Reddit. You have to start with the brand account and the brand content.
Steve publicly acknowledging that community success is a problem Reddit needs to solve is a real signal for brands. They know the legitimate path looks like the bad path right now, and they’re working on a way to tell them apart. That changes the math for any brand that’s been holding off on launching its own community because they were worried about getting flagged.
The Human Voice Argument Is Now Official
There is no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence, and that intelligence has to come from real people having real conversations somewhere. Steve said almost exactly that on the call.
He went further when Justin Post asked about AI engines using Reddit data:
“You can get a surface level answer from AI, but you need the context. For many questions, there isn’t an answer. There are multiple perspectives describing that answer and multiple reasons why different parts of that answer might be relevant to you or not.”
That’s the validation phase, almost word for word, how I’ve been describing it to clients and on stage for nearly two years. The place in the user journey where people go to feel okay about a decision they’re about to make, where they want context and nuance and other people’s experiences, not a summary. There aren’t many moments where you get to hear a public company CEO articulate the framework you’ve been building your work around. Watching it happen on an earnings call was its own kind of validation.
This is a much bigger deal than most people are giving it credit for. The last few years of digital marketing have been everyone chasing what AI can do faster, cheaper, and at more scale. Reddit is the platform that bet on what AI can’t do, which is generate authentic human conversation. As more of the internet gets summarized and optimized for attention by models, the value of real human discussion goes up, not down.
What’s new is that Reddit’s CEO is now making that the official corporate position. Steve and Jen both came back to the human voice argument multiple times during the call. They tied it to ad value, to user retention, to the AI deals, and to why brands should be on Reddit in the first place.
For marketers, the read is that Reddit isn’t a trend you’re trying to catch. It’s the platform whose entire reason for being is now lining up with how people are actually using the internet in the AI era.
The AI Deals And Search Are Durable
Since so many marketers are focused on the connection between Reddit, Google, and LLMs, it’s important to note the Google and OpenAI deals are still in place and still valuable to both sides. Rich Greenfield asked, pointedly, whether the $50-60 million a year Reddit gets from those deals is enough given how important the data is. Steve didn’t bite on a renegotiation question, but he didn’t need to. He confirmed the relationships are mutual, active, and evolving.
The read for marketers is that the AI side of Reddit’s business isn’t a one-off windfall; it’s a structural part of how AI gets trained and how AI answers questions. If you’re trying to show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, or anywhere else an LLM is answering, Reddit is in the supply chain.
Search on Reddit itself was also called out as a real priority. Search WAUqs are up 30% year-over-year, and Reddit is putting actual engineering investment into making it better. People aren’t only stumbling onto Reddit through Google anymore; they’re going to Reddit on purpose to find things they can’t get from a Google search or an LLM answer.
The part organic marketers should pay closest attention to is what’s happening with Reddit Answers, Reddit’s AI-powered search experience inside the platform. Steve said Reddit Answers is becoming more agentic, and gave specific examples. You can now ask it to compare two things, like “should I watch movie A or movie B,” and they’re integrating Reddit’s product search catalog directly into the answers, so when you ask what’s the best headphone, you get product links right inside the response.
This is the validation phase, moving inside Reddit itself. People used to go to Google, find a Reddit thread, click through, and read. Now, Reddit is offering to do the synthesis for them with the same human conversations underneath. That’s a different shape of search, and it sits at exactly the moment in the buyer journey where decisions actually get made.
If you’re an organic marketer, that changes how you should think about Reddit content, the same way pillar pages once changed how people thought about blog posts.
What I Take From All This
If you’ve been waiting on Reddit because the platform felt too closed off, this is your sign. The walls are coming down, the growth math is real, and Reddit’s strategic position around AI and human conversation is locking in publicly.
The next phase of marketing isn’t another channel; it’s being human in the places people go to find other humans. Reddit just made that the official strategy.
If you want to go deeper on what all this actually looks like in practice, I’d point you to two recent webinars I did with Search Engine Journal. “Reddit Marketing in 2026: What Changed, What Actually Works Now“ covers the broader strategic shift, and the more recent “From Reddit to Revenue: Building Real Community That Drives Sales and AI Visibility“ gets into the practical side. Both pick up where this article leaves off.
And if you’ve been struggling to figure out how to get on Reddit or make it actually work for your brand, that’s literally what we do at OGS Media. Reach out at ogsmedia.com if you want to talk through it.
More Resources:
- Why Authority In Online Communities Such As Reddit And Quora Matters
- Reddit Karma: Why It Matters More Than Ever
- AMA: Reddit Marketing Veteran Shares What Works On The Platform
Featured Image: Brent Csutoras/Search Engine Journal
