93 Reddit Statistics: Users, Search, AI Citations, and Bans

On 20 October 2026 we ran 100 searches a software buyer types into Google, from “best crm software” to the review check before a contract. A Reddit thread sat on the first page of 87 of them.¹ Most SaaS plans still file Reddit under social media, a network you might advertise on. These figures say it is the layer buyers search through.

Reddit sits inside the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) workstream at Empact Partners, the B2B SaaS go-to-market consultancy publishing this page. Our formula is GEO = UGC + Mentions: the user-generated content (UGC) buyers write in public, plus the mentions independent pages give a brand. Reddit is home ground for the first half.

Highlights

Read together, they put Reddit in the three places a software purchase gets decided: the Google results page, the AI answer, and the check a buyer runs on a shortlist. They also show the gate. Reddit bans spam accounts by the hundred thousand, so a brand’s presence lasts only where it reads as a person answering a question.

Reddit Reaches Half a Billion People a Week, and Most of Its Growth Arrives Logged Out

Reddit’s results for the second quarter of 2026, published on 30 July, are the latest it has reported. Its numbers for the quarter:

The growth is coming from people who do not sign in. Set the second quarter of each year side by side and the shift is plain: in Q2 2023 Reddit had 28.3 million logged-out daily uniques against 32.1 million logged in,⁸ and by Q2 2025 the split was 61.1 million to 49.3 million.⁹

By our arithmetic on Reddit’s second-quarter releases, 71% of the daily uniques Reddit added between Q2 2023 and Q2 2026 arrived logged out, and the logged-out share of its daily audience went from 47% to 60%.² The two halves crossed at the end of 2023, when logged-out visitors reached 36.7 million against 36.4 million logged in.¹⁰

Reddit told investors where those visitors come from. Its IPO filing says logged-out users made up 75% of the incremental users added between July and December 2023, and that they “typically come to Reddit via search engines.”⁶

That series now ends. Reddit’s annual report for 2025 says it will stop reporting logged-in and logged-out daily uniques from the quarter ending 30 September 2026.¹¹ The second quarter of 2026 is the last reading of the split it will publish.

Leon Claassen

Senior GTM Consultant @ Empact Partners

Seven in ten of the daily users Reddit added in three years were not signed in, and Reddit’s own filing says that kind of visitor arrives from search engines. So the person reading a thread about your category is a buyer who typed the question into Google and clicked, with no subreddit to belong to and no loyalty to anyone in it. Plan Reddit as a search channel first and a community second.

Who is on Reddit

Reddit’s reach is wider than its reputation. Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey of 5,022 U.S. adults found:

The skew runs young, educated, and well paid, which looks more like a software buying committee than Reddit’s reputation does. Similarweb ranked reddit.com the fifth most visited website in the U.S. in September 2026, behind Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon.¹³

Reddit counted 197.2 million weekly uniques in the U.S. and 317.4 million elsewhere in the second quarter.¹⁴ About 57% of its visitors in late 2025 came from outside the U.S.¹¹

How many accounts exist, and how many are created each day, Reddit does not publish. It reports uniques: people it can identify visiting in a day or a week, signed in or not. The nearest disclosed figure to a count of accounts in use is the 52.6 million logged-in daily uniques of the second quarter.²

How much there is to read

The archive that search engines and AI engines draw on keeps growing:

The translation line matters to a SaaS team. A thread written in English about your category can now reach readers in 35 languages, which widens the audience of every thread that already ranks.

Search Is Reddit’s Front Door, and Google Holds the Key

Logged-out growth is search growth, and Reddit says so whenever Google moves. Its letter for late 2024 described “volatility with Google Search triggered by a periodic algorithm change” and said such swings “primarily affect logged-out users.”¹⁵ In mid-2026 its chief executive wrote that “search referrals were choppy in the quarter.”¹⁴

SISTRIX, which scores domains on their visibility in Google, shows what is at stake. Its data of 28 July 2026:

SISTRIX reads reddit.com as past its peak, having retreated from the high it reached in October 2025.¹⁶ Semrush counts about 263 million Google keywords that reddit.com ranks for.⁵ A domain past its peak and still ranking for that many keywords remains the fourth-largest presence on Google in the U.S.

Reddit is also building a front door of its own, and its letters to shareholders track it:

Reddit calls the people who arrive with a question “seekers” and puts them at about 60 million, against nearly 50 million “scrollers” who come for their communities.¹⁸ A software buyer is a seeker.

What a software buyer sees on Google’s first page

On 20 October 2026 we ran 100 searches through DataForSEO against Google in the U.S., in English, on desktop and logged out: 50 category searches such as “best payroll software,” 25 review checks on well-known products, and 25 head-to-head comparisons. On the first page, Reddit showed up in:

The review checks and comparisons are the telling part. Reddit reached the first page on 48 of those 50 searches, and Google’s forum block carried a Reddit thread on 35 of them.¹ Google is putting Reddit into the moment a buyer checks a shortlist, as a feature of the page as well as a ranking.

Rank and citation travel together. Qvery, our sister company, tracks the answers ChatGPT and Google AI Mode give each day, and in its data a query on which an AI engine cites Reddit has Reddit in Google’s organic top ten 78.5% of the time.²⁰

We share ownership with Qvery, so weigh its figures accordingly. Each Qvery study we cite is linked, so you can check it rather than take our word.

That overlap is where the Reddit side of a Generative Engine Optimization engagement at Empact Partners is measured from: which threads hold a partner’s category searches on the first page, and which of those threads the AI answers cite.

Google and OpenAI Pay for Reddit’s Data, and the Price Is Not the Point

Google does more than rank Reddit. Since February 2024 it has had direct access to Reddit’s data, and OpenAI has had the same since May 2024. The deals, as the companies and filings describe them:

Google and OpenAI are the two licensing partners Reddit has announced. Whether they are the two in the annual report, the filing does not say.

The money lands in Reddit’s “Other revenue,” which it defines as content licensing plus products sold directly to users:¹¹

Against advertising, licensing is shrinking in share. By our arithmetic on Reddit’s releases, Other revenue fell from 10% of quarterly revenue in Q2 2024 to 5% in Q2 2026, because advertising grew faster.²

For Reddit the deal is small money. What Google and OpenAI bought is structured, real-time access to the place where people say which product worked for them.

The engines pay Reddit for a pipe into what people say about the products they use, and a software buyer’s question gets answered out of that pipe.

The citations are where that access shows up for a buyer, and they can be counted.

AI Engines Cite Reddit More Than Almost Any Website, Measured Three Ways

How much of an AI answer comes from Reddit depends on what you count. The studies count three ways, and each gives a different true number.

Links and answers are different denominators. An AI answer cites many links, so a source can be about one link in a hundred and still appear in a quarter of the answers. Quote the ruler with the number, or someone will set a link share beside an answer share and decide one of them is wrong when both are right.

The count of top sources is the one that ranks Reddit first. Ahrefs’ Brand Radar data for Google AI Mode in the U.S., September 2026:

YouTube and google.com, second and third, belong to Google. The one source ahead of both is the platform whose data Google arranged direct access to in 2024.

By links alone, ChatGPT cites Reddit slightly more often than Google AI Mode does, 1.31% of its citations against 0.97%,²⁰ and Google AI Mode ranks it higher when it does. In Qvery’s data AI Mode puts Reddit in the first citation slot 5.0% of the time, against 1.4% for ChatGPT.²⁰

In Software Answers, Reddit Stands Level With the Vendor’s Own Website

The studies so far count every topic. For software, Empact Partners counted with Qvery: 97,799 answers from ChatGPT and 96,600 from Google AI Mode to the question sets Qvery tracks for sixteen software companies, June to August 2026, aggregate only. Qvery is ours, so read the cut as our own measurement. What the answers cited:

On ChatGPT, Reddit is cited in more answers than the vendor’s own site. On Google AI Mode the two are level. Review sites, the line most SaaS budgets already fund, trail both on both engines.

Qvery’s own SaaS reading points the same way: Reddit takes 1.57% of citations in SaaS queries, about 34% above its average across all verticals and third among domains for software questions.²⁷ Traditional review sites lost about 78% of their citation share from January to March 2026.²⁷

The framing of the question moves the number too. When Qvery asked fintech needs as a product choice, 14.50% of answers cited Reddit, against 3.50% when the same needs were framed as a situation.²⁸

Leon Claassen

Senior GTM Consultant @ Empact Partners

Reddit appears in 22.8% of ChatGPT’s answers about software and the vendor’s own website in 17%, and in nine of fifteen categories Reddit is ahead outright. A GEO budget that funds only the website is funding the source that loses that comparison. UGC is half of the formula because the engines read it as the buyer’s side of the story, and no page on your own domain can be that.

UGC and Mentions are also how we split the work. GEO = UGC + Mentions puts the threads a category’s answers cite on one side and the independent pages that name a partner on the other.

A partnership starts with an audit of both, on the partner’s own category questions. The roadmap that follows runs the two halves together, with standing reports on first-page presence, citations, and named mentions.

Reddit’s Weight Moves, Sometimes by Five Sixths in Six Weeks

Each of those figures is a snapshot, and Reddit’s share of the answers swings. The studies that tracked it over time:

The September 2025 drop is the chart a skeptical CFO will find. Semrush measured it in answers. Qvery, counting links, saw Reddit’s ChatGPT share rising again by early 2026. The two do not share a ruler, so read them as direction rather than a recovery to the old level.

At thread level the picture is steadier. In our run on Qvery’s data, 10.5% of Reddit threads first cited in March 2026 were still being cited in August. For the software companies’ own pages the figure was 7.9%.⁴ Across our own partnerships Reddit results have come in lumps rather than a smooth line, and we say so before a program starts.

The platform’s weight moves by the month, and a cited thread tends to stay cited longer than a vendor page. Judge a Reddit program over quarters, and read a single month’s drop as weather.

The Threads Engines Cite Are Small, Old, and Specific

The threads behind those citations are rarely the famous ones. Semrush traced 248,000 Reddit URLs cited across 217,000 prompts:

The questions that pull Reddit into an answer are buying questions. Of 1,000 chatbot prompts that mention or cite Reddit, SISTRIX classed 36% as recommendation requests and 25% as guides.¹⁶ Reddit says around 40% of the conversations on its platform are commercial, people “actively discussing products, services, and purchase decisions.”³²

Buyers say they trust what they find there. Reddit’s own surveys of its users:

Both are the platform asking its own users, so read them as Reddit’s case for itself.

The slice that matters is small. In our run on Qvery’s data a software category drew a median of 714 distinct Reddit threads into its answers over three months, and the ten most-cited threads carried 30.8% of the category’s Reddit citations.⁴

That concentration is what makes being seen on Reddit a job with a measurable result. Two of our Reddit programs are public case studies:

Leon Claassen

Senior GTM Consultant @ Empact Partners

The brokerage’s first five posts are the number to show a CFO: 100,000 views and no leads. Views measure reach on a platform that already has half a billion weekly users. What a Reddit workstream should report is narrower: whether the threads your category’s answers cite exist, whether they name you, and whether the people who read them become pipeline.

Reddit Bans Spam Accounts at a Rate of 2,900 a Day

Reddit does not count promotional posting separately. Its closest category is spam, which its rules define as “repeated or unsolicited actions (whether automated or manual) that negatively affect users, communities, and/or Reddit itself.”³⁵

Its examples include mass-posting for exposure or financial gain and a bot that keeps promoting products. Anyone whose posts are mostly links to their own business is told to post less often or buy advertising.³⁵

Reddit’s Transparency Report for July to December 2025 counts what those rules removed:

Reddit says it blocks 23 million spam views a day before they reach a person, and that user exposure to spam fell 20%.¹⁴ Across every kind of content, about 2.66% of what was created in the first half of 2025 was removed.³⁶

Reddit publishes no count of new accounts. The ban-evasion line is the closest it comes: 1,446,274 accounts in six months, each one made to get around an earlier ban and then caught.

Read beside the spam count, it says the platform removes a brand that posts for itself, at a scale no posting schedule outlasts, and keeps the thread that answers a question somebody asked.

Fund Reddit as a Search Channel, and Measure It in Threads

A SaaS team should fund Reddit inside its Generative Engine Optimization budget as a search and answer channel, measured on the threads that hold its category’s searches and answers. It should stop funding Reddit as social media measured on posts and views.

Watch Reddit’s total daily uniques once the logged-in split leaves its third-quarter results. If growth holds near the second quarter’s 18%,² the search door is still open. What these figures cannot settle is how much of Reddit’s Google visibility survives the next core update. SISTRIX already reads it as past its peak.

If your category’s searches and AI answers already run through Reddit threads that never mention you, book a call with us, and we can see together whether that is work for us.

Sources

1. Empact Partners, Google first-page run. 100 software-buying searches (50 category searches, 25 review checks, 25 head-to-head comparisons) through DataForSEO against Google in the U.S., English, desktop, logged out, first results page with its AI Overview, one pass on 20 October 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
2. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results,” 30 July 2026, with its key operating metrics table. The shares of daily uniques and of revenue are our arithmetic on this and the earlier second-quarter releases. Read 20 October 2026.
3. Ahrefs, “The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Mode (September 2026),” updated 2 September 2026. Brand Radar, broad U.S. queries across all topics; mention share is a share of the top sources’ citations. Read 20 October 2026.
4. Empact Partners, our run on Qvery’s data. The tracked question sets of sixteen software companies, 97,799 answers from ChatGPT and 96,600 from Google AI Mode given between 1 June and 31 August 2026, and URLs tracked month by month from March 2026; aggregate only. Run 19 September 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
5. Semrush, “The Most-Cited Domains in AI: A 3-Month Study,” published 10 November 2025 by Luke Harsel. Over 230,000 prompts on ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, weekly from 14 July to 12 October 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
6. Reddit, Inc., Form S-1 Registration Statement, filed with the SEC on 22 February 2024. Read 20 October 2026.
7. Reddit, Inc., “Transparency Report: July to December 2025,” including Chart 5 (posts and comments removed by admins) and Chart 16 (account sanctions by Reddit Rules violation). Read 20 October 2026.
8. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit Announces Second Quarter 2024 Results,” August 2024, with the Q2 2023 comparison column. Read 20 October 2026.
9. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit Announces Second Quarter 2025 Results,” 31 July 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
10. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results,” 12 February 2025, with the Q4 2023 comparison column. Read 20 October 2026.
11. Reddit, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed 6 February 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
12. Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025,” 20 November 2025. 5,022 U.S. adults, 5 February to 18 June 2025; demographic figures from its table of use by group. Read 20 October 2026.
13. Similarweb, “Top Websites Ranking in United States,” September 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
14. Reddit, Inc., Q2 2026 Letter to Shareholders, 30 July 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
15. Reddit, Inc., Q4 2024 Letter to Shareholders, 12 February 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
16. SISTRIX, “Reddit Domain Performance Analysis,” by Steve Paine, data of 28 July 2026, page modified 4 September 2026. SISTRIX Visibility Index on Google organic results. Read 20 October 2026.
17. Reddit, Inc., Q1 2025 Letter to Shareholders, 1 May 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
18. Reddit, Inc., Q2 2025 Letter to Shareholders, 31 July 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
19. Reddit, Inc., Q4 2025 Letter to Shareholders, 5 February 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
20. Qvery, “Reddit Is the Most Important Website for AI Search Visibility,” by Vlad Shvets, 17 March 2026. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode; shares of all citation links among well-known domains. Read 20 October 2026.
21. Google, “An expanded partnership with Reddit,” by Rajan Patel, 22 February 2024. Read 20 October 2026.
22. Reuters, “Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google,” February 2024. The annual value is reported from one unnamed source. Read 20 October 2026.
23. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit and OpenAI Build Partnership,” 16 May 2024. Read 20 October 2026.
24. Reddit, Inc., “Reddit Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results,” 5 February 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
25. Profound, “AI Platform Citation Patterns: How ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity Source Information,” 5 June 2025, updated August 2025. A dataset of 680 million citations covering August 2024 to June 2025. Read 20 October 2026.
26. Semrush, “We Analyzed 248K Reddit Posts: What Drives Visibility in AI Search,” 10 November 2025. 217,000 prompts on ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Read 20 October 2026.
27. Qvery, “Reddit Marketing for SaaS: The AI Visibility Channel,” by Vlad Shvets, 7 June 2026. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, tracked daily since January 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
28. Qvery, “Reddit Marketing for Fintech: What AI Answers Cite,” September 2026. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, the same fintech needs framed as a product choice and as a situation. Read 20 October 2026.
29. Qvery, “AI Search Citation Trends: March 2026,” by Vlad Shvets, 28 March 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
30. Qvery, “Social Media in AI Search: ChatGPT vs Google AI Mode,” by Vlad Shvets, 8 May 2026. January to April 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
31. Qvery, “98% of UGC Citations in AI Search Come From Just Four Platforms,” by Vlad Shvets, 8 May 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
32. Reddit, Inc., Q1 2026 Letter to Shareholders, 30 April 2026. The 84% comes from Reddit’s own survey of 1,004 monthly U.S. users on Attest panels, February 2026. Read 20 October 2026.
33. Empact Partners, KKday case study. One partnership, a three-month Reddit program; the figures are the ones its public page prints. Read 20 October 2026.
34. Empact Partners, insurance brokerage case study. One partnership, unnamed on its public page; the figures are the ones that page prints. Read 20 October 2026.
35. Reddit Help, “Spam,” the Reddit Rules article on spam. Read 20 October 2026.
36. Reddit, Inc., “Transparency Report: January to June 2025.” Read 20 October 2026.