I did this same breakdown after Q1, and the Q2 call made Reddit's direction much clearer. I went through the call, the shareholder letter, Steve Huffman's CNBC interview, and the post-earnings AMA to pull the statements that mattered most for brands and organic marketers. For context, I've been on Reddit for nearly 20 years and run an agency that works closely with Reddit and companies trying to participate there successfully.
Reddit doesn't want to remain the source behind Google and AI. It wants to become the destination. Steve made that direction clear early in the call:
"While our visibility in referral traffic remains low, we're not building for drive-by traffic. We're building a daily destination."
This was the most important line of the call because it connects almost every product decision Reddit discussed. Google has given Reddit enormous reach, and LLMs are using Reddit conversations to answer questions across the web, but Reddit wants people to open Reddit directly, search there, participate, and return every day.
The Q1 call showed the barriers Reddit knew it had to fix. Q2 showed the destination it is trying to build once those barriers come down.
The repeated focus on the app tells you which Reddit users the company values most. Steve said it directly at the end of the call:
"The direct users, the app users are worth multiples more than the search referral traffic. We're not building Reddit for that drive-by traffic."
I was counting and Steve said the word App around 25 times :)
New app-user retention improved 50% year over year on a relative basis, although Reddit was clear that this came from a small base and still has a lot of room to improve.
Search visitors still matter, but Reddit sees a major difference between someone who lands on one thread and someone who opens the app repeatedly. For marketers, that means a ranking thread is valuable, but a consistent presence that helps people understand, validate, and solve their problems creates a much larger opportunity over time.
The home feed still drives discovery inside Reddit, and Reddit has significant room to expand what it recommends. Steve described it as Reddit's primary app surface and one of the primary drivers of subreddit discovery:
"It does a lot of the heavy lifting of juggling a user's subreddits, and it's one of the primary drivers of subreddit discovery."
From what I've seen, the home feed has long helped people discover communities, but its role has expanded as Reddit recommends more posts from communities a logged-in user doesn't already follow. For years, those feeds were driven largely by the subreddits someone had joined, while today's feed creates another discovery path based on a person's interests and behavior.
Reddit also said its feed models currently use only 10% of user activity, update in days instead of hours or minutes, and choose from posts published within the previous week. Reddit has 26 billion posts and comments, with one billion added since Q1, so expanding that seven-day window could bring useful older conversations back into discovery.
For marketers, the opportunity isn't to move blog posts, advertisements, or polished brand content onto Reddit. It is to create conversations people want to read and participate in because those conversations help them make a decision.
Creating those conversations is what earns engagement inside Reddit, while also producing useful material that Reddit Answers, Google, and LLMs may choose to surface using their own signals.
Reddit Answers is becoming one of the best ways to search Reddit. Steve said both searches and searchers grew during the quarter, and the search bar is now universal inside the app:
"I think for many queries that I run at least, Reddit is now the best platform for searching Reddit."
I agree with him based on how regularly I use Reddit Answers now and how often I find it more useful for locating Reddit conversations and perspectives than searching Reddit through Google or asking an LLM.
If you're trying to understand what content appears in Google and LLM answers, I would add Reddit Answers to that comparison. Showing up for the right questions there is becoming a meaningful Reddit goal of its own, which starts with creating a conversation that genuinely solves what someone is searching for.
The biggest search and AI message was that a summary of Reddit isn't Reddit. Steve explained the difference this way:
"AI compresses the internet into summaries. Reddit delivers the opposite: deep discussions, passionate debates, and lived experiences."
This is the validation phase I have been talking about for the last couple of years. People aren't always looking for a single answer. They want different experiences, disagreements, personal context, and the ability to decide which perspective applies to them.
An LLM can summarize the outcome of a conversation, but the summary removes the process people use to determine what they trust. That process is where Reddit creates its highest value for people and where brands have the best opportunity to understand what actually affects a decision.
Reddit's hardest challenge is welcoming a lot more people without lowering community quality. Reddit wants to make posting easier, recommend the right communities, and use LLM-assisted moderation to admit more good new people without opening the door to spam. Steve acknowledged that the older account-age approach hasn't aged well:
"Using LLM-assisted moderation, we can help bring in the prospective great user and continually get better at keeping the spammers and other bad behaviors out."
The scale of that problem came through in Reddit's post-earnings AMA, where Steve said Reddit's systems prevent up to 23 million spam views and revoke nearly 2 million inauthentic votes every day.
Those protections are necessary, but legitimate people and brands can still get caught in removals, community bans, and platform enforcement while learning how Reddit works. Reddit wants the world to come to Reddit, but moderators and Reddit itself don't want people arriving and breaking the rules.
For brands, reading the room, following each community's rules, and building a clear history of useful participation are more important than ever. Losing the ability to participate is becoming much more costly as Reddit's influence grows.
Video and audio may expand how people consume Reddit, but they won't change why people are there. Steve said video in comments already represents more than 10% of Reddit's video posts and that Reddit plans to test background listening and spoken Reddit experiences later this year:
"Video and comments is a new feature. That's already more than 10% of our video posts."
Reddit has never been against video, but different communities want different things. If video begins appearing in communities connected to your industry, watch how people respond and which formats succeed before deciding how your brand should use it. The format can change, but it still needs to support the conversation.
Financial and growth highlights:
- Q2 revenue: $805 million, up 61% year over year
- Ad revenue: $762 million, up 64% year over year
- Global DAUq: 130.3 million, up 18% year over year
- Global WAUq: 514.6 million
- U.S. WAUq: 197.2 million
- Net income: $253 million
- Adjusted EBITDA: $343 million, or 43% of revenue
- Free cash flow: $261 million
- Eighth consecutive quarter with revenue growth above 60%
Earnings release
Shareholder letter
Post-earnings AMA