After being harried by complaints that its search function needed improving, Reddit has in the last few years invested in its search engine, and has even added AI features to help its users find what they’re looking for. It appears that investment is finally paying off: The company has seen a 30% year-on-year jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday.

Huffman noted that search has been one of the major drivers of user acquisition and retention for the platform.

“On search, we have seen great performance. Search DAUs, WAUs, and queries are up meaningfully year-over-year. It’s a great driver of retention and DAUs. The search team is, quite frankly, I think doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see it is better integrated into the product,” he said on the company’s first quarter post-results conference call.

Earlier in February, the platform started testing product placement through AI search results in the U.S.

Huffman said that around 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% shoppers feel more confident in their buying decisions after researching on Reddit.

The social platform ended the quarter with more than 493 million weekly active unique users (WAUq), up 23% from the same period last year, and about 126 million daily active unique users (DAUq), a 17% improvement from a year earlier.

Reddit reported a 7% improvement in U.S. visitors, reaching 53.5 million DAUqs, and 73.3 million DAUqs internationally, a 26% increase. The company said it plans to reach a billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the U.S.

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Besides search, the company said its machine translation feature, which now supports over 30 languages, has driven significant user growth in the past few quarters.

Reddit reported revenue of $663 million in Q1 2026, beating Wall Street’s expectations of $609.8 million. The company also said it only spent $1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.

Topics

AI search, Earnings results, Reddit, Social

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Ivan Mehta

Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.

You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal.

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People are finally using Reddit's search