Reddit The company said on Monday it was rolling out a new artificial intelligence feature designed to help people find answers quickly based on user posts.
The Reddit Answers feature will be available to a small portion of Reddit’s US user base as part of an initial test before the company rolls out the feature more broadly.
Reddit Answers are available through a new button on the company’s homepage. The button takes users to a page where they can ask AI questions, just like with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other generative AI services.
Unlike other AI-powered chat and search tools, Reddit’s AI-generated answers come from posts found on the platform, not from around the web.
For example, if a user asks Reddit Answers how to make modifications to a specific BMW model, the AI tool will answer a bulleted list of tips, summaries, and quotes from Reddit posts related to the question. Users can click on the link in the answer and go directly to the related Reddit post.
Serkan Piantino, Reddit’s vice president of product, told CNBC that the company has been testing Reddit Answers for six months as part of Reddit’s plan to improve how people search on the platform.
Piantino said Reddit Answers is more about “building a bridge to content than replacing it.” He said the company hopes people will use the feature to access more of Reddit’s content rather than just read AI-generated summaries.
Piantino said people will be able to use Reddit Answers to query any topic, except those deemed NSFW or not safe for work.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told analysts in October that search represents a “focused investment” for the company in 2025 because of its utility and its ability to “help new users find their home on Reddit.”
“It helps core users navigate Reddit, answer their questions, and that’s a monetization opportunity,” Huffman said. explain during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “This is one of the few products that touches everything.”
Piantino said Reddit Answers is built on the company’s existing search architecture and uses artificial intelligence models from OpenAI and Google Cloud. The social media company has partnered with OpenAI and Google Among other things, these companies pay Reddit to access its data and use it to improve their respective artificial intelligence models.
Over the past year, Reddit has become one of the most visited sites through Google after the company made internal changes and Google updated its algorithms to prioritize “authentic” content from online forums. As a result, Reddit said, there was an influx of new users who were not logged into their accounts on the platform.
While Reddit’s overall user base has grown as Google search results have improved, the number of logged-out users has exceeded the number of logged-in users since the fourth quarter of 2023, according to Reddit’s financial data. Reddit’s inability to monetize logged-out users as much as logged-in users has led the company to release more personalization features aimed at incentivizing logged-out users to create accounts.
“Reddit is the sixth most searched term on Google in the U.S. this year, so these people are actually typing the word Reddit into Google,” Huffman said in October. “They know they’ll get there eventually. In this case, they use Google to browse Reddit.”
Through Reddit Answers, the company may be able to attract more users to search for Reddit content on the platform, thereby reducing the company’s reliance on Google traffic. If new users find the feature compelling, they may be enticed to create an account.
“It’s clear that artificial intelligence has a place in search, and that’s how we think about it,” Piantino said.
Piantino said Reddit Answers is currently only available in English for iOS and desktop users, but the company plans to roll out the feature to Android users as well as other languages in the future.
watch: CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit is where advertisers need to be
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