Reddit will make everyone log in to browse the site

Reddit has announced a major shift: browsing the site will soon require logging in. CEO Steve Huffman described the move as turning Reddit into a "logged-in-only experience."

Right now, anyone can read Reddit without an account, and many people value it as a crowdsourced resource on a huge range of topics. The Verge's reporter admits that, like plenty of others, he often adds "reddit" to Google searches to find answers written by actual humans rather than robots. But that same openness has made the platform a target for scraping and automated traffic. Reddit has already filed lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access to its data and limited access to "Old Reddit."

Timing and details

There is no firm timeline for rolling the change out to all users. It is also unclear what the site will look like for logged-out visitors, such as someone who receives a link to a thread from a friend. According to Huffman, Reddit will test the requirement in "select markets outside the US" in the "coming months." "We'll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there," he said. The company has also rebuilt the Reddit app's incognito mode and is releasing it again.

The company's case

Huffman argues that requiring logins improves the user experience, benefits the ads business, and is "more protective of Reddit data." He says the "vast majority" of unauthorized access comes through logged-out experiences. Reddit will still sign data licensing deals, as it did with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Nor does the company need to know who is behind an account: "Honestly, we don't want to know." It only needs to know that a user is logged in. More logged-in users, Huffman added, means "more relevant ads."

"This is a big change for Reddit, where we've allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades," he said. "And I don't know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it's a big change for me. But I've come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business."

Falling search traffic

The announcement came with Reddit's Q3 2026 earnings. In the shareholder letter, Huffman said search traffic was "down meaningfully" during the quarter, with logged-out and web traffic hit hardest. "During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," he wrote.

At the same time, Huffman said app users and logged-in daily active uniques account for "over 80% of the monetization on Reddit." In his view, that reflects Reddit's strength as a destination in its own right and the results of the company's ongoing product work.

Source: The Verge