Reddit's AI Powered Search and Answers

Hey Everyone,

I’m genuinely excited about Reddit improving Search, because search is such a pain point on Google, especially regards to what people have actually said on Reddit. Sure Perplexity is great, so is genspark.AI for that matter. But now that Reddit is a public company, it needs to actually innovate and improve the product experience like one!

So the reason it matters to know what real people are saying, is that more channels are being filled with AI generated posts, Tweets, spam and just slop and marketing. This is unfortunately what you get when your digital media is owned by BigTEch who also control Generative AI’s future

Is this going to make Quora obsolete? I haven’t gone on that site in years. Reddit is rolling out a new artificial intelligence feature designed to help people quickly find answers based on user posts, Reddit announced on Monday.

In recent months, Reddit is ramping up efforts to attract more users outside of the U.S., putting countries like India and Brazil in focus. Finding things on Reddit has never been well, easy.

Reddit Answers uses AI to answer your questions with summarized information from across the platform.

How to keep people on the site for longer? This inspire that Reddit looks like some message board from the early 2000s? Make it searchable dummy with RAG and LLM Models. Reddit is oddly one of the few places I actually would consider using some sort of a chatbot to find human relevant answers or sort Reddit as a whole.

It would also be a great way to actually have citations with Reddit trends that makes research a bit more interesting. The tool, similar to other AI search products, responds to queries by generating well-formatted responses and showing links to its sources. This is also more data transparency.

Where do we stand with this Today?

The company is rolling out Reddit Answers to a limited number of users in the United States, in English, according to the post. It plans to add more locations and languages in the future.

So it’s basically in Beta. But as they ramp up Ads in the U.S., it’s really a great idea. Just as Meta is getting more into AI and RAG Search on its Meta Platforms apps. Not so much a family when you are 3 billion users though ugh.

Reddit is a bit like Snap or Pinterest, it’s neither here nor there and could get acquired in the coming years.

Reddit made a net income of $29.9 million in its third quarter as a publicly-traded firm, which ended September 30, on revenues of $348.4 million - a 68 percent year-over-year increase. Most of this appears to be letting LLM frontier makers train on its data. Um, our data.

How is Reddit Positioning AI Search

“People know that Reddit has answers, advice and perspectives on almost anything they’re looking for, and AI-powered search is part of our longer-term vision to improve the search experience on Reddit — making it faster, smarter and more relevant,” the post said.

What people are often looking for are real reviews. Amazon reviews and travel reviews tend to have a lot of fake reviews. Even to find real opinions on stocks or games seem to be a rarity in this bot and slop internet that has somehow been allowed to manifest.

If Reddit can build anything like a Perplexity style UX but for Reddit search I’ll be very pleased. All of this RAG stuff makes knowledge bases and social respositories a lot more useful. By leveraging natural language processing, machine learning and user data, AI search tools can deeply understand complex queries and deliver tailored results and recommendations.

Can this hurt Google?

Yes at scale it could, because we wouldn’t have to do that annoying Topic + Reddit thing in Google any longer. Effectively, Reddit Answers important because it will source things directly from Reddit, which means it could be a way to skip Google and get information directly from the source.

Google is losing marketshare in Europe along with heavy users of Gen AI search tools, like white collar professionals who need to search nearly constantly in their work.

Search is bifurcating and this should accelerate in 2025 even as more ChatGPT usage means more Search queries in ChatGPT itself. But combined with Perplexity, You dot com and all the other more AI-based search engines, it does splinter the uses cases where we do or don’t even use Google at all any longer. As Google has raised prices on their bidding system in an anti-competiive way it’s made Google Ads more expensive, but if less search are actually happening, eventually that has to be adjusted. The minimum bid offer manipulation of Google Search Ads would fall apart.

So Reddit Answers is super relevant for Reddit’s own future Advertising growth, and it’s thus an important product development for many reasons.

Sam Altman has a stake in Reddit and the OpenAI partnership might benefit both companies. You might recall Reddit said in May that it formed a partnership with OpenAI that includes Reddit building on OpenAI’s platform of AI models to bring new AI-powered features to Reddit users and moderators.

Reddit Answers will thus likely be a combination of RAG, in-house models and OpenAI’s own API or custom models. We’ll know more later.

Reddit and Snap have both done a terrible job of going global. So there’s at least that potential upside. In a wide-ranging interview, Jen Wong, chief operating officer of Reddit, said other platforms have 80% to 90% of users outside of the U.S. while about half of her company’s current users are based internationally.

Reddit thinks Reddit Answers can boost engagement on the platform and they rationalize it like this: to use the feature to access more Reddit content as opposed to merely reading AI-generated summaries. But isn’t an answer just a summary of human generated content? The argument is a bit circulular.

There are already Gen AI tools to search Reddit better too. Although you can often discover them and similar things, on Reddit subreddit comments.