Reddit's CEO just admitted something
$GOOGL would rather you didn't hear!!
"Google is crawling us as hard as ever. AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody."
The way the internet ran on for 25 years is you let Google read your site, and Google sends you visitors/traffic. That deal is over now and it’s all because of AI.
Google now reads Reddit, writes the answer itself and the user never leaves the search page.
Reddit does the work and Google keeps the reader…and that’s how money is being made.
For
$RDDT, its biggest front door is closing which is why the stock is down -25% this morning. Huffman's plan is that people will just come to Reddit directly. Maybe. But US user growth is already down to 6%, and "we'll change everyone's habits" is a hope that’s never gonna come.
For Google, the issue is the same. The damage is slower but it goes deeper. Its AI is only as smart as the open web it learns from. Stop sending sites traffic, and they'll lock their content up, sell it to rival labs or block Google outright. Google is eating the thing it feeds on.
AI killed the click and both of these companies were built on it. It's a fight over who survives the next version of the internet…
$GOOGL looks interesting if they cannot win the search