Reddit Stock Falls 33% as CEO Confirms Google Traffic Decline

Reddit's stock dropped roughly 33-36% over the past week after CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that Google Search referral traffic to Reddit has been shrinking — and he tied the loss directly to Google's AI features.

In a CNBC interview, Huffman said the company's search-referral traffic from Google went "down meaningfully in this quarter" due to the "shift to AI mode and AI overviews." That's a confirmed statement from Reddit's own CEO, not tool-based speculation. He framed it as something bigger than a routine algorithm fluctuation.

The traffic decline is also shaping Reddit's product strategy. It played a big role in the company's plan to push visitors into becoming logged-in users.

What did Huffman actually say?

Huffman's core argument: the Google-internet relationship is changing in a structural way.

"I think fundamentally that relationship between Google and the rest of the internet is evolving, and so for us, this means a continued focus on our core users that come to Reddit directly," Huffman told CNBC.

He drew a sharp line between past volatility and today's shift. Previous Google algorithm changes would "kind of come and go," he said. Google's AI efforts, by contrast, represent "a fundamental shift in how the Google product works, from being a traffic driver to whatever's going on now."

Takeaway: Reddit's CEO is treating AI-powered search as permanent, not seasonal — and he's repositioning the company around direct, logged-in usage instead of Google referrals.

What do third-party tools show?

This is the speculation side, and it's worth keeping separate from Huffman's confirmed remarks. Semrush data on the traffic Google sends Reddit, and the keywords Reddit ranks for, shows a steeper-looking picture than the stock chart alone. Those charts can be sliced by section, language and region, so the simplified view circulating publicly doesn't capture everything.

SEO consultant Glenn Gabe added a specific data point on X. "I published a three-part series on Reddit's AI translations documenting the rise and fall of that content," he wrote. "Those translations (tens of millions of urls across many countries) took a big hit with the May 2026 core update and June spam update. Now Reddit is explaining more about that drop."

If Gabe's read holds, part of the decline may stem from Google's own quality systems hitting Reddit's machine-translated pages — tens of millions of URLs across many countries — rather than purely from AI Overviews absorbing clicks.

Takeaway: tool signals suggest two overlapping causes — AI answer surfaces and lost rankings for scaled translated content — and Reddit hasn't confirmed the exact split.

Does Reddit get special treatment from Google?

Google recently stated that Reddit gets no special preference in Search. That statement came after years of Reddit enjoying unusually strong placement across countless query results.

The relationship has been fraying for a while. As far back as February 2025, Reddit was publicly complaining that Google wasn't sending it enough traffic. There's also a content licensing deal between Google and Reddit — the one that lets Google use Reddit content for AI training — and nobody outside the two companies knows whether it will be renewed.

Takeaway: the special-treatment era looks over, and the licensing deal that formalized the data relationship now has a question mark hanging over it.

Why SEOs saw this coming

The pattern is old. Google has ranked Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia and many other properties extremely well over the years, then dropped them. When that happens, a huge chunk of traffic disappears — "poof," as one observer put it at the time.

Huffman's earlier confidence that anybody using Google would eventually end up on Reddit aged poorly. The stock chart and the Semrush charts now tell the same story from different angles: a platform that leaned heavily on one referral source is paying for it in market value.

Takeaway: dependence on Google traffic is a concentration risk, and markets now price it that way.

What to watch next

Watch three things: whether the Google-Reddit content deal gets renewed, whether logged-in user growth offsets the referral losses Huffman described, and whether the next core or spam updates deepen the hit to Reddit's translated pages or stabilize them.