It was recently announced that Reddit had overtaken TikTok as the fourth most used social media service in the UK.
A report from Ofcom states that it has achieved double digit year-on year growth, up 28% in monthly audiences as of May 2025. This is the second year in a row it has seen such significant growth, with it reaching 60% of UK internet users.
Reddit is not a new platform, having been founded in June 2005, by roommates American web developer Steve Huffman and American internet entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, they were also joined by American computer programmer Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) later. So what explains the recent growth of the platform?
Created first and foremost as a forum-based social media platform, it differentiated itself from the usual social media sites. Once seen as more of a niche platform centring on conversations on specific topics and areas of interest, its recent growth is partly being attributed to an increase in internet users seeking more authentic, real conversations.
At a time when AI large language models are creating perfectly-formed answers to user questions and prompts, perhaps this increase shows a hunger for more 'human' answers - ones that reflect lived human experience with the debates, arguments, emotions and different points of view that reflect real-life experience.
Reddit offers real, raw comments and answers, and the anonymity it offers to users seems to mean people are generally more inclined to share real experiences, as opposed to the tightly-selected highlights reel that you would tend to see shared on other social media platforms, where friends, family and employers may be watching.
So, what exactly is Reddit?
If you haven’t been accessing Reddit during this period of massive growth in the platform and are perhaps unfamiliar with the way it works, let us break it down.
Like other social platforms, it lets users create posts which can be text based, images, videos and links. These posts can be published into themed conversations and discussions called 'subreddits'. You can post to a personal profile but posting into a subreddit allows for more visibility, as your post will appear in that community’s feed and so in front of people with an interest in that particular topic.
Other users can then comment on the post and engage in discussion. Posts can also be upvoted or downvoted depending on whether a user likes or dislikes the post. The more upvotes a post receives, the more visible it will be on the site. Likewise, if a post has more downvotes, it will be less visible.
You can join subreddits once you have created an account, posts from these subreddits will then appear in your feed. If you use the site without creating an account, the sites most popular posts across a range of subreddits will be displayed in the feed.
Users can also create subreddits, which makes you the owner (or moderator) of the subreddit, ensuring the content abides by the rules you set as well as Reddit’s own content rules and policies. Users or owners of a subreddit can appoint other moderators to the subreddit to help manage the content. Moderators or owners of a subreddit manage the subreddit on a voluntary rather than paid basis, giving many of them an authentic, grass-roots feel. Generally you will find a relevant subreddit already exists on almost any given topic under the sun but there is nothing to stop you adding your own spin.
Image created using ChatGPT.
The history of Reddit
Founded in 2005, Reddit launched with funding support from Y Combinator, a start-up incubator ran by English-American computer scientist and entrepreneur Paul Graham. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian had attended a lecture given by Paul Graham in Boston. Graham invited them to apply for the incubator during a discussion following the lecture.
When the site first launched, the founders felt the need (as with many community websites) to create a number of fake users that they used to publish posts from in order to give the impression of activity and popularity. In November 2005, American Businessman Christopher Slowe joined the company and later between late 2005 and early 2006, Aaron Swartz’s company Infogami was merged with Reddit.
After Swartz joined the team he helped to rewrite the software used to run Reddit. He had previously created a web framework, web.py, which was thought to be a better fit for Reddit due to its simplicity and performance, than the current software, Lisp, that Reddit was using.
On 31 October 2006, Huffman and Ohanian completed the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast Publications, at which point the team relocated to San Francisco.
Later in January 2007, Swartz was asked to leave the business for unknown reasons. He believed it may have been due to his dislike of the new office environment.
Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit in 2009 to work on other companies. Erik Martin became community manager and later general manager in 2011 in their absence. American engineer and entrepreneur Yishan Wong joined the company and was CEO from 2012 – 2014 and was credited by Ohanian for growing Reddit’s user base substantially while he was there - over this period, users grew from 35 million to 174 million.
Ellen Pao, American lawyer and businesswoman replaced Wong in 2014 but left Reddit shortly after in 2015. At this point, founders Huffman and Ohanian re-joined the company as CEO and Executive Chairman. Many changes and updates were made following the founders return such as launching the iOS and Android apps and an overhaul of the website in 2018.
Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 21st March 2024 offering shares at $47, by the end of their first day trading this has risen too $50.44 per share. Their current share price stands at $244.02 per (correct as of 13th January 2026).
Image created using ChatGPT.
The future of Reddit
Given the significant recent growth of the platform, and its use as a trusted source by ChatGPT, the future of Reddit currently looks assured.
The company has taken steps to ensure that future is secure in the AI landscape by obtaining content partnerships with OpenAI, reportedly worth $70 million a year, and Google, reportedly worth $60 million a year, in order to ensure that conversations on Reddit feed back into AI tools, and are referenced in answers to relevant questions.
Through the partnerships both Open AI and Google have access to the Reddit Data API, meaning both can access real-time information and discussions taking place within Reddit to be used within their answer engines, Chat GPT and Google Gemini, and other tools.
Giving this type of access to these answer engines and letting them train on their content ensures the visibility of Reddit within these answer engines. This has helped in Reddit's case to offset the impact that generative search and AI answer engines have been having on organic traffic from Google and other sources, as well as making Reddit a go-to site for marketers who wish to increase their 'reach' in AI answers.
And this looks to be working very well. In June 2025, Profound reported that www.reddit.com was the most cited domain on Google AI Overviews and Perplexity and in September 2025, Ahrefs reported that www.reddit.com was the most cited domain on ChatGPT globally.
This type of content partnership may be the future of how AI operators will work with content publishers in order to back off and cite original human-generated content. Many publications aren’t happy with AI answer engines training on their content, for fear of that content being reproduced without proper attribution, and the value of their original content being diminished. Reddit shows that those fears are perhaps not entirely well-founded.
The partnerships also allow Reddit to utilise the AI-powered features and offerings from both companies in order to better serve their community and provide an improved experience.
Whilst Reddit is working with some of the leading AI companies through agreed partnerships, it still believes in the protection of original content. In September 2025, Reddit backed Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open content licensing standard which enables content publishers and publications to define their own terms for how data can be used and should be compensated by AI crawlers.
With this great deal of visibility on some of the leading AI answer platforms, we do think Reddit will be more vulnerable to spamming, similar to an old SEO trick of posting business links into forums for promotion, we may start to see this kind of activity within a number of subreddits in the hope of being cited within an AI generated answer.
The platform already contends with a likely amount of botting and spamming due to the Contributor Programme, which was introduced in 2023. The programme is essentially a way for users to make money from the platform through the amount of karma and awards received on posts and comments. Monetising the platform in this way encourages increased posts from bot accounts as a way of farming karma from users in order to exchange it for money.
We’ll be interested to see if there is an increase in marketing and spam activity on the site in future, and how Reddit and the subreddit owners and moderators will manage this.
Conclusion
The recent growth Reddit has seen mainly comes down to two things. Firstly, with the emergence and rapid advancements within generative search and answer engines, users have access to a refined, polished response to nearly all their queries. Whilst in many cases this is exactly what the user wants, when they are looking for a human point of view or experience, this may not be suitable.
In some cases, users will want to do more research, hear real first-hand experiences and recommendations in order to solve their query. That’s exactly what Reddit offers, with its unfiltered conversations and discussions from real people.
Secondly, they have taken a forward-thinking approach by recognising and leveraging the power within their content and negotiating content partnerships with two of the biggest AI LLM operators. Whilst some sites and content publishers shied away from what seemed to be becoming the new norm and took a stand against these companies in order to protect their content, Reddit has stepped forward seemingly calculating that this would be the best and most lucrative option for them. In this way, by utilising this new income stream they have ensured their content has value in the changing digital landscape.
While the long-term results remain to be seen, Reddit looks to be leading the way here - we think this kind of content partnership or licensing deal will be the way that more and more publishers and creators of size will work with AI companies going forward, in order to protect the rights and value of their content whilst ensuring they maintain visibility.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on Reddit, whether or not you use it and if you plan to use it going forward. Get in touch here.
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