Reddit's era of open browsing could be coming to an end

Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, announced that Reddit might soon become a logged-in-only experience. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images Your lurking days on Reddit may be numbered.Reddit plans to begin testing a primarily logged-in experience, a shift that could make it harder for casual visitors to browse the site without an account.CEO and cofounder Steve Huffman said on Thursday's earnings call that Reddit will test the change in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter. The company has not said when it will roll out a fully logged-in experience globally.The tests will help Reddit determine how much content logged-out visitors can still access, including through shared links, search, and its front page.This is a departure from the open platform it has been for over two decades, where internet users could view its content without logging in."It's a big one for us, and it's a big one for me," Huffman said to investors about the change. He gave a few reasons for the shift.First, logged-in users mean Reddit can target ads more effectively, as they provide the platform with more information to make ad decisions. COO Jen Wong added that more than 80% of Reddit's monetization "sits on the shoulders of logged-in and app users," calling them the company's "bedrock."Second, the move aims to protect Reddit content from third-party scraping."The vast majority of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out user base," Huffman said. He did not specify who the third parties involved in content scraping were, AI agents or otherwise. Reddit addressed similar concerns in 2024, updating its "Robots Exclusion Policy" to put guardrails in place against unknown bots crawling its site. It also sued Anthropic, Perplexity, and several other data-mining companies last year, accusing them of scraping Reddit comments for AI training.Reddit reported a 53% increase in third-quarter revenue, from $584 million in 2025 to $895 million in 2026. Its global daily active unique users in the quarter rose 12% to 130.3 million, even as US users declined 2%.Huffman said Reddit's search-referral traffic was down in the third quarter. In October, search traffic fell by more than 1 million referrals per week on average, he said. If that rate continues, he said Reddit could lose a significant percentage of its current 130 million daily active unique users in the fourth quarter.The company's stock dropped more than 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday. Read next Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Aditi is a news reporter at Business Insider’s Singapore bureau. She covers hustle culture and the future of work, focusing on how AI and technology are reshaping jobs, careers, and workplaces.She previously worked for The Straits Times, where she wrote breaking news stories for the Singapore desk. She studied communications and business at Nanyang Technological University. Reddit