Reddit to require sign-ins for most content as AI scraping cuts search traffic

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced plans to make signing-in mandatory for most content, citing data scraping and declining search referral traffic, which could cut daily active users by a low double-digit percentage in Q4. Search referrals dropped by over one million weekly in October, and US daily users fell 2% to 50.7 million. Reddit, which licenses data to OpenAI and Google, has sued Anthropic, Perplexity, and three scrapers, while testing logged-in-only access in select markets. The shift ends two decades of open browsing, though logged-in users drive over 80% of monetization. Q3 revenue hit $895 million, beating estimates, with Q4 forecasts largely in line with analyst expectations.