Reddit's era of open browsing could be coming to an end

Your lurking days on Reddit may be numbered.

Reddit plans to commencement evaluation a chiefly logged-in experience, a change that could create it harder for informal visitors to browse the location without an account.

CEO and cofounder Steve Huffman said on Thursday's earnings call that Reddit volition test the alter in choose markets exterior the US in the fourth quarter. The business has not stated whenever it volition rotate out a completely logged-in cognition globally.

The tests volition assistance Reddit decide how much satisfied logged-out visitors can motionless access, including through shared links, search, and its forefront page.

This is a departure from the open phase it has been for complete two decades, anywhere net users could perspective its satisfied without logging in.

"It's a big one for us, and it's a big one for me," Huffman stated to investors concerning the change. He gave a few reasons for the shift.

First, logged-in users average Reddit can mark ads additional effectively, as they provision the phase alongside additional data to create ad decisions. COO Jen Wong added that additional than 80% of Reddit's monetization "sits on the shoulders of logged-in and app users," calling them the company's "bedrock."

Second, the move aims to defend Reddit satisfied from third-party scraping.

"The huge bulk of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out person base," Huffman said. He did not define who the third parties engaged in satisfied abrasion were, AI agents or otherwise.

Reddit addressed akin concerns in 2024, updating its "Robots Exclusion Policy" to put guardrails in location against unidentified bots crawling its site. It additionally sued Anthropic, Perplexity, and multiple another data-mining companies final year, accusing them of abrasion Reddit comments for AI training.

Reddit reported a 53% addition in third-quarter revenue, from $584 myriad in 2025 to $895 myriad in 2026. Its earth regular energetic distinctive users in the fourth rosy 12% to 130.3 million, equal as US users declined 2%.

Huffman stated Reddit's search-referral traffic was downward in the third quarter. In October, hunt traffic cut by additional than 1 myriad referrals per week on average, he said. If that charge continues, he stated Reddit could endure a important percent of its current 130 myriad regular energetic distinctive users in the fourth quarter.

The company's inventory dropped additional than 17% in after-hours selling on Thursday.