Reddit has spent years fielding complaints about a search function that users widely consider broken. The company began investing heavily in fixing this and then building AI features on top of it.
In Q1 2026, those bets delivered their clearest results yet: Weekly search users increased 30% year-over-year, CEO Steve Huffman said on a conference call following the company’s results Thursday.
“DAU, WAU searches and queries are up meaningfully year-over-year,” Huffman told analysts. “It’s a great driver of retention and DAU.” He specifically pointed to Reddit Answers’ platform’s AI-powered search feature as evidence of better integration into the broader product. Search teams are “obviously doing a great job,” he said.
Reddit’s AI test campaign of product placement in search results began in the United States in February, showing that search is now being used not only as a retention method, but also as a monetization avenue.
According to Huffman, about 40% of discussions on Reddit are business-oriented, with 84% of consumers admitting to making better purchasing decisions because of research on the site.
Reddit ended Q1 2026 with more than 493 million weekly active unique users, a 23% increase from the same period a year earlier. Daily active unique users reached approximately 126 million, an increase of 17% year-on-year. International growth is outpacing domestic expansion: The number of international daily active users increased 26% to 73.3 million, while daily active users in the US increased 7% to 53.5 million.
Apart from search, Reddit’s recently launched machine translation system, which supports over 30 languages, has become a major driver behind the platform’s growing international base in recent quarters.
The company said that its goal of reaching one billion daily active users globally and 100 million daily active users in the US largely depends on these two initiatives.
Reddit reported revenue of $663 million in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $609.8 million. The company also disclosed capital expenditures of just $1 million for the quarter, which pales in comparison to the billions of dollars being spent by cloud and AI infrastructure competitors.
