AI-powered Reddit search now available to select users • The Register

Reddit’s internal search engine is often criticized as one of the site’s weakest features but the platform claims AI integration will make it “faster, smarter, and more relevant.”

Reddit Answers, which the site announced has begun rolling out to a limited number of users in the US today, allows redditors to “ask questions and receive answers using a new, AI-powered conversational interface” that returns “curated summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit … including links to related communities and posts,” the social media giant said in a blog post. 

Reddit didn’t include much information about what it’ll look like, with the blog post featuring only a single animated GIF of an example search for “tips for better sleep.”

If you use Google, you know perfectly well what this looks like: Google search results now surface bullet-pointed, AI-generated answers to many questions users ask, and the GIF included in Reddit’s blog post suggests it operates in a similar way.

However, in Reddit’s case, the AI-powered results won’t cull data from around the internet; instead, it will rely on posts and comments from the site to provide answers. Just like the ChatGPT does.

Only a few users have been invited to the Answers beta, with Reddit promising an invitation to this vulture that has yet to materialize. If you’re lucky enough to have access, you’ll find the feature at reddit.com/answers, or on the Reddit homepage along with buttons for Home, Popular posts, Explore, and the like. 

The Answers feature is also available in the latest version of the Reddit app for iOS, where those with access will find it along the bottom of the home screen with buttons for Home, Communities, Chat and other features. No word on an Android release was provided. 

It’s also not clear when it will be made more widely available, with a Reddit spokesperson only telling us the biz has plans to expand Answers to additional languages in the coming months. 

Unsurprising … and unwelcome?

Reddit has been vocal about its plans to integrate AI into the site. In February, it announced a partnership with Google to provide post and comment data to the Chocolate Factory for its AI models, followed by signing a deal with OpenAI in May to integrate Reddit content into ChatGPT, too.  

Reddit told us that Answers is “Reddit-built tech and not based on a partnership,” and while the company integrates models from OpenAI and Google, Answers is a model of its very own. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following Reddit since it went public in March: The social media giant finally turned a profit for the first time in its history in its third quarter of 2024, which ended in October, and AI has been credited with much of the reason for the boost. 

As we mentioned in our look at Reddit going all-in on AI, CEO Steve Huffman has had plenty to say about plans to integrate AI into Reddit’s search engine, a site feature that has had no end of criticism from redditors.

“[Search is] an important part of our strategy and will be a focused investment for us heading into 2025,” Huffman said on the Q3 earnings call.

“We’ll start working [on] integrating LLMs into making our results more sophisticated … you’ll start to see this over the course of the next year,” Huffman added. 

Redditors commenting on the news, however, don’t seem as enthused as Huffman or investors about the prospect of AI Answers on Reddit. 

“So instead of finding a way to make Reddit search actually work and not be a flaming dumpster they turn to AI to try and fill in the blanks,” one user opined in a thread discussing the Answers beta launch. Another poster noted that it was purely a move to please investors and VCs, while others predicted chaos as highly-upvoted sarcastic responses work their way into top results, à la suggestions to eat rocks or add glue to pizza cheese to help it stick. 

Reddit assured us that users don’t need to worry about Answers ruining the site or subsuming the existing search function: It’s not going away, so you’re free to keep hating both. 

As for how well it works, we’ll let you know if and when we get access. ®