Reddit says weekly use of its search feature rose 30% year over year, CEO Steve Huffman told investors on Thursday. The company has invested in search and added AI tools and says those changes are driving acquisition and retention. Reddit ended Q1 2026 with more than 493 million weekly active unique users and 126 million daily active unique users, each up double digits from a year earlier. The boost in search use came alongside $663 million in revenue for the quarter and experiments that tie search to commerce.

Search finally sticks

Reddit has pushed improvements to search over the last few years. The company added AI features and tighter product integration. Those moves are now showing in user behaviour, Steve Huffman, Reddit's CEO, said on the company’s post-results conference call.

Huffman said search daily active users, weekly active users and total queries are all meaningfully higher year over year. He called search a major driver of retention and a strong source of new users.

The company also highlighted a feature called Reddit Answers and said it's better integrated into the main product. Huffman said that integration is part of what has made search more useful.

If you use Reddit Answers, he said, you can see it's better integrated into the product.

Search is no longer a niche tool for Redditors. More people are turning to it to find threads, recommendations and past discussions. That change shows up in the raw numbers Reddit presented for the quarter.

How Reddit built it

Reddit moved to improve search after users complained about poor results. The company invested engineering resources and added machine learning and AI elements. Those systems help surface older posts and summarize threads, the company said on the call.

In February, Reddit began testing product placement inside AI-driven search results in the U.S. The tests place commercial items within search answers. The company didn't disclose revenue tied directly to the tests on the call.

Reddit also expanded machine translation support. This feature now covers over 30 languages. The company said translation has helped growth across markets in recent quarters.

Mastheads

Huffman linked these product moves directly to business goals. He said search helps people discover content, keeps them on the site and makes them return. Those are clear aims for any social platform trying to grow users and time spent.

Business results and reach

Reddit reported a Q1 2026 revenue figure of $663 million. That number topped the $609.8 million analysts had expected. The company said it spent just $1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.

User totals rose sharply alongside the search gains. Reddit ended the quarter with more than 493 million weekly active unique users, up 23% from the same period last year. Daily active unique users reached about 126 million, a 17% improvement over the prior year.

The U.S. Audience also grew. Reddit said U.S. Daily active unique users were 53.5 million, a 7% increase from a year earlier. International daily active unique users hit 73.3 million, a 26% rise.

Huffman stated the platform aims to reach a billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the U.S. He framed search as a tool that helps meet those targets by making the product easier to use and more useful to newcomers.

The company also stressed the commercial side of the platform. Huffman said around 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature. He added that 84% of shoppers feel more confident in their buying decisions after researching on Reddit. Those figures point to search as a channel for discovery and shopping-related research.

Product placement tests in AI search and the high share of commercial conversations suggest Reddit is exploring ways to turn search activity into revenue. The company didn't lay out a full monetization plan on the call. But it clearly tied search improvements to both growth and commerce.

User experience and international reach

Machine translation supporting more than 30 languages has made Reddit more accessible to non-English speakers, the company said. That expansion coincides with higher international daily user growth, which rose 26% in the quarter.

Improved translation and AI search work together. Translation broadens the set of content a user can find.

AI-powered search can then surface relevant posts across languages. Reddit pointed to both features as contributors to recent growth.

Reddit's emphasis on integration also shows up in product design. Huffman said search is now more tightly woven into Reddit's core experience. That makes it easier for people to move from discovery to conversation to follow-up research.

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Huffman said Reddit aims for a billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the U.S., with search improvements a key lever; the company reported Q1 2026 revenue of $663 million.

This article was created with AI assistance.