Earlier this year Reddit on AI companies and some major search engines, saying that companies would not be allowed to scrape its site unless they struck licensing deals with the company. Now, the “front page of the internet” is introducing its own AI-powered search feature.
Called “Reddit Answers,” the feature provides summaries of conversations and posts from across the site in a “conversational interface.” Relying on content from all public, SFW subreddits, the goal is for Reddit to be able to directly provide relevant results for queries that people may otherwise find via Google searches, where it’s become increasingly common to append “Reddit” to queries.
While that sounds a lot like a Reddit-based search engine, VP of product Serkan Piantino says that Reddit Answers isn’t necessarily trying to come up with a singular answer the way you might expect with a Google search. Instead, the tools surfaced a handful of bullet points pulled directly from relevant threads on Reddit. Those conversations are linked directly in the interface, as are relevant subreddits where users can dive deeper into similar topics. “A big theme is that it does sort of guide you towards the content itself, instead of trying to represent an answer on its own,” Piantino tells Engadget.
Reddit gave me early access to the feature and the current version looks a bit like Meta’s AI search suggestions in Instagram, with a few dozen suggested queries and accompanying emoji. The responses, however, are detailed and link directly to highly-upvoted comments from various subreddits where Redditors have previously weighed in on similar topics. That’s helpful because some of the results may not make sense without the broader context from the thread (like in the answer screenshotted adobe that references an image of Price Harry).
I also noticed that many of Reddit’s built-in suggestions centered around product questions, like “best robot vacuum” or “best vitamin C serum.” While that’s not necessarily surprising — many people already turn to Reddit forums for buying advice — it also raises questions about whether the company could potentially monetize the new search feature. “It’s something that we’ve thought about at a high level, but we have no immediate plans for monetization,” Piantino said when I asked him about it.
For now, he said, the feature is still in beta and will be rolling out slowly. As of today, Reddit Answers is making its way to a “limited number” of users in the US on web and iOS, with a broader rollout expected sometime next year.
