Reddit cracked down on major search engines and AI companies earlier this year, saying that companies would not be allowed to scrape the site unless they struck licensing deals. In spite of this, the “front page of the Internet” is now introducing its own AI-powered search feature.
Reddit Answers is an AI tool designed to provide summaries of posts and conversations from across the site using a “conventional interface”. Relying on content from the public via SFW subreddits, the goal is for Reddit to be able to provide relevant results for queries that people may find via Google search, where it has become increasingly common to append “Reddit” to queries.
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Serkan Piantino, Reddit’s VP of Product, has said that Reddit Answers is not necessarily trying to come up with a singular answer the way you may expect with a traditional Google search. Rather, the tools generate a handful of bullet points that are pulled directly from relevant threads on Reddit. These conversations are directly linked in the interface, as are the relevant subreddits in which 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 told Engadget.
In its current iteration, the Reddit Answers tool is similar to Meta’s AI search suggestions on Instagram, with several suggested queries and emoji. Responses are detailed and link to highly-upvoted comments from various subreddits in which Redditors weighed in on similar topics. This is helpful because the results won’t often make sense without the thread’s broader context.
Furthermore, Reddit Answers’s built-in suggestions focus on product questions. While this may not be necessarily surprising, as people regularly turn to Reddit for buying advice, it raises questions regarding whether the company could monetize its new search feature. As of now, there are no immediate plans to do so.
For now, 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.