After being plagued by complaints that its search function needed to be improved, Reddit has invested in its search engine over the past few years, and even added AI features to help its users find what they’re looking for. The investment finally seems to be paying off: The company has seen a 30 percent year-over-year increase in the number of people using search each week, CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday.

Huffman noted that search has been a major driver of user acquisition and retention for the platform.

“On search, we’ve seen great performance. Search DAUs, WAUs, and queries continue to grow meaningfully year over year. That’s a great driver of retention and DAUs. The search team, quite frankly, I think is doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see that it integrates better into the product,” he said on the company’s first conference call post.

In early February, the platform began testing product placement through AI search results in the US.

About 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% of shoppers feel more confident in their purchase decisions after doing research on Reddit, Huffman said.

The social platform ended the quarter with 493 million weekly active unique users (WAUq), up 23 percent from the same period last year, and nearly 126 million daily active unique users (DAUq), a 17 percent improvement over a year ago.

Reddit reported a 7% improvement in US visitors, to 53.5 million DAUqs, and internationally to 73.3 million DAUqs, a 26% increase. The company said it plans to reach one billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the US.

In addition to search, the company said its machine translation feature, which now supports more than 30 languages, has driven significant user growth over the past few quarters.

Reddit reported Q1 2026 revenue of $663 million, beating Wall Street expectations of $609.8 million. The company also said it spent just under $1 million in the quarter.