The Receipts

Reddit by the Numbers: The Stats, Quotes, Case Studies, AMAs, and Features That Show Its Power

Every figure sourced and linked. Current as of July 20, 2026.

Reddit went from "that forum site" to the most-cited domain in AI answers, a top-10 website on Earth, and the place people add by name to their searches when they want the truth. This page collects the receipts: the platform’s numbers, what Reddit’s own leadership says, the brand campaigns that worked, the AMAs that made history, and every feature the platform has shipped. Every figure links to its source. Figures are current as of July 20, 2026; Reddit reports Q2 2026 earnings on July 30, and those numbers will supersede the Q1 figures below.

Reddit by the Numbers

Platform scale

  • 126.8 million daily active uniques, up 17% year over year (Reddit Q1 2026 shareholder letter, SEC)
  • 493.1 million weekly active uniques, up 23% year over year. CEO Steve Huffman frames it as "nearly 500 million weekly users globally and 200 million in the United States" (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • US daily users: 53.5 million (up 7%). International daily users: 73.3 million (up 26%), now 58% of the daily total (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • Reddit’s stated goal: 100 million daily US users, nearly double today’s number (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • More than 25 billion posts and comments, "the internet’s largest collection of community-driven conversation" (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • Reddit communities generate the equivalent of Wikipedia’s entire content library in new content every month (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • 100,000+ active communities (Q4 2025 shareholder letter, SEC)
  • More than 80 million people search directly on Reddit every week, up from 60 million a year earlier (Q4 2025, SEC)
  • Content is machine-translated into 30+ languages and optimized locally (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • reddit.com is the #8 most-visited website in the world and #2 in the social media category, with roughly 5.08 billion visits in June 2026 and an average session of 12 minutes 8 seconds (Similarweb, Semrush, June 2026)
  • In the UK, three in five people now encounter Reddit online, up from one in three in 2023, and women are more than half of Reddit’s UK users (UK press coverage cited in the Q1 2026 letter, SEC)

Growth and finance

  • Q1 2026 revenue: $663.4 million, up 69% year over year, the seventh straight quarter of 60%+ growth (SEC, CNBC)
  • Q1 2026 advertising revenue: $625 million, up 74% (SEC)
  • Full-year 2025 revenue: $2,202.5 million, up 69%, with international growing faster than the US (Q4 2025, SEC)
  • Full-year 2025 net income: $530 million (a 24% margin), a $1,014 million improvement over 2024 (Q4 2025, SEC)
  • Q1 2026 net income: $204.0 million (a 31% margin), up 680% year over year, with free cash flow of $311 million and $2.77 billion in cash (Q1 2026, SEC)
  • Q4 2025: revenue of $725.6 million (up 70%), and 11 of Reddit’s top 15 advertiser verticals grew 50%+ (Q4 2025, SEC)
  • Reddit’s first GAAP-profitable quarter was Q3 2024; five quarters later it was earning $200 million+ per quarter (Q3 2024 letter, SEC)
  • IPO’d March 21, 2024 on the NYSE at $34 per share, a roughly $6.4 billion valuation (CNBC). As of July 20, 2026 the stock trades around $184 with a market cap near $35.5 billion, roughly 5.5x the IPO valuation (StockAnalysis)
  • AI data licensing: the Google deal was reported at about $60 million per year and the OpenAI deal at about $70 million per year (press-reported estimates; the only official figure is $203 million in aggregate contract value disclosed in the IPO prospectus) (CJR, Search Engine Land)
  • About 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, people discussing products, services, and purchase decisions, and high-intent shopping conversations grew 40% year over year (Q1 2026, SEC)

Search and AI power

  • Reddit is the most-cited domain across major AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity), ahead of YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes, per a synthesis of 680 million+ citations (Search Engine Land, AI Citation Index 2026)
  • A 13-week Semrush study of 230,000+ prompts and 100 million+ citations found Reddit and Wikipedia are ChatGPT’s two most-cited domains. Citation share is volatile: ChatGPT cited Reddit in roughly 60% of responses in early August 2025 before dropping to about 10% by mid-September (Semrush, Nov 2025)
  • AI citations concentrate hard: the top 15 domains capture about 68% of consolidated AI citation share, with Reddit at the top (AI Citation Index 2026)
  • Reddit appears in about 37% of Google search results pages and features in about 95% of product-review queries (Semrush, 2025)
  • An earlier study found Reddit appears 97.5% of the time in Google product-review searches and holds nearly two-thirds of the slots in Google’s "Discussions and forums" feature (Search Engine Land, Feb 2024)
  • Reddit’s Google search visibility grew about 191% in 2024 after Google’s helpful-content updates and the Google partnership (Search Engine Land)
  • "Reddit" was the sixth most-searched term on Google in the US in 2024, a figure cited by Reddit’s CEO (Backlinko)
  • Reddit Answers, the platform’s AI search, grew from about 1 million to 15 million weekly queries over 2025, and total weekly search users grew 30% year over year to 80 million+ (Q4 2025, SEC)
  • Google AI Overviews appear in roughly 15% of search results, and those summaries frequently pull from Reddit, Quora, and YouTube before traditional websites (Semrush Sensor, Dec 2025)

Trust and buyer behavior

  • 26% of US adults use Reddit in 2025, up from 22% in 2023, 18% in 2021, and 11% in 2019 (Pew Research Center, Nov 2025)
  • Nearly half (48%) of US adults 18 to 29 use Reddit, along with 35% of those 30 to 49 (Pew fact sheet, 2025)
  • Reddit skews affluent and educated: 37% of US adults in $100K+ households and 37% of college graduates use it (Pew fact sheet, 2025)
  • 84% of Reddit shoppers feel more confident in their purchase decisions after researching products on Reddit (Reddit/Attest survey of 1,004 monthly users, Feb 2026, cited in the Q1 2026 letter, SEC)
  • One in three Redditors frequently use the platform for pre-purchase research, and 63% say they’re more confident in decisions made from Reddit community interactions than from other social platforms (eMarketer, 2025)
  • Reddit users reach final purchase decisions 9x faster and spend 15% more than users of other social platforms (Reddit for Business research, Adweek; Reddit-published, so label the source when citing)
  • 71% of Redditors search for brands on the platform to inform purchase decisions (Reddit stat via Marketing Dive, 2026)
  • In B2B, 73% of decision-makers trust peer insights above vendor websites (55%), search engines (54%), review sites (46%), AI chatbots (39%), and social media (36%). 23% of B2B decision-makers use Reddit for research, including 32% of software buyers (Reddit + SurveyMonkey "Hidden B2B Journey" study, March 2026, Demand Gen Report)
  • 58% of Redditors say seeing brands respond directly to customers in Reddit threads increases their trust in the brand (Reddit + SurveyMonkey, March 2026, CMSWire)
  • 75% of surveyed US Redditors said Reddit is a trustworthy place to inform a purchase decision (Reddit S-1, SEC, 2024)
  • 80% of users in a Reddit survey said they believe some questions can only be answered by humans, not AI summaries (Q2 2025 earnings call, transcript)

In Reddit’s Own Words

What the company and its leadership say about the platform, verified against the original filings, transcripts, and interviews.

On being the human place on the internet

  • "One of the founding principles of Reddit was that it be a real place cultivated by real people instead of a fake place manicured by editors and other gatekeepers." (Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO, Reddit S-1 founder letter, 2024)
  • "Reddit is not a social media platform optimized for self-display; it is a community that rewards candor and honest advice. This is why millions of people trust Reddit for everything from relationship guidance to in-depth product recommendations (and add 'reddit' by name to their searches for virtually anything)." (Huffman, S-1, 2024)
  • "We believe Reddit is the most human place on the internet." (Reddit, Inc., S-1, 2024)
  • "As more of the content you see online is synthesized, summarized and sanitized by AI, Reddit stands out for its honesty and subjectivity." (Huffman, Q2 2025 earnings call)
  • "The most radical thing a platform can offer is people talking to people." (Jen Wong, COO, Fortune, June 2026)
  • "We are a pillar of the internet." (Wong, Fortune, June 2026)
  • "Reddit is the world’s greatest bullshit detector." (Huffman, Sourcery interview, March 2026)

On AI and Reddit’s data

  • "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free." (Huffman, The New York Times, April 2023)
  • "Reddit’s vast and unmatched archive of real, timely, and relevant human conversation on literally any topic is an invaluable dataset for a variety of purposes, including search, AI training, and research." (Huffman, S-1, 2024)
  • "Platforms like Reddit, where people discuss every aspect of life, from the trivial to the transformative, are the backbone of building AI that actually works. That’s why Reddit is the #1 most cited domain for AI across all models." (Huffman, Q2 2025 earnings call)
  • "AI doesn’t invent knowledge, it learns from us. From real people, sharing real perspectives. You can’t have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence." (Huffman, Q2 2025 earnings call)
  • "LLMs would not exist as we know them without Reddit." (Huffman, remarks reported by Search Engine Journal, 2026)
  • "Reddit’s conversations are like oil for the modern internet, a foundational resource powering the next generation of technology." (Huffman, Q1 2026 earnings call)
  • "Reddit is built on more than 2 decades of human conversation. Over 25 billion posts and comments and every month, our communities generate the equivalent of Wikipedia’s entire content library in new content." (Huffman, Q1 2026 earnings call)

On search

  • "Users that utilize third-party search engines can arrive at Reddit organically or even by appending 'Reddit' to their searches for better results." (Reddit, Inc., S-1, 2024)
  • "I think what’s happening is people know that Reddit has answers, advice, perspectives on just about whatever you’re looking for." (Huffman, WSJ Tech Live, reported by Benzinga, Oct 2024)
  • "Reddit is one of the few platforms positioned to become a true search destination. We offer something special, a breadth of conversations and knowledge you can’t find anywhere else." (Huffman, Q2 2025 earnings call)

On advertising and commerce

  • "For advertisers, we provide access to a unique and highly engaged audience where our trusted, passionate communities drive recommendations on brands and buying decisions." (Reddit, Inc., S-1, 2024)
  • "The word 'community' has become a buzzword, but it’s our lifeblood, and marketers value it." (Wong, AdExchanger, May 2024)
  • "You’re going to find customers you can’t find in other places because they’re revealing interest in things that you never just post on Instagram." (Wong, Marketing Brew, May 2024)
  • "Marketers really understand that Reddit is so valuable for its recommendations because humans provide the answers." (Wong, Q4 2025 earnings call)
  • "Reddit is deeply ingrained in the consumer shopping experience and we saw the momentum continue with 40% year-over-year growth in high-intent shopping conversations." (Wong, Q1 2026 earnings call)
  • "I think there was a myth that our communities would be against commercialization. That’s not true, so long as you’re adding value to the user." (Wong, Fortune, June 2026)
  • "We are very early in our monetization journey and in our product journey. The goal is 1 billion users." (Wong, Fortune, June 2026)

Brands That Won on Reddit

Documented, sourced campaign results, organic and paid.

CeraVe: "Michael CeraVe" (2024). L’Oreal’s CeraVe found a Reddit shower-thought joking that actor Michael Cera was behind the brand, ran a four-week conspiracy campaign seeded on Reddit, and revealed the joke in its first Super Bowl ad. Results per its Shorty Awards entry: 32 billion earned impressions against a goal of 1 billion, CeraVe’s highest-ever moisturizer sales week, #1 share of voice among Super Bowl conversations with 2.4x the engagement of all other health and beauty brands combined, and the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Social and Influencer. (Shorty Awards, Marketing Dive)

Dove: "r/eal reviews" (2026). Dove took the first 50 Reddit reviews of its serum mask, negative ones included, and built a multichannel campaign around them. The Redditor reaction that says it all: "Did Dove seriously just leave the comments open. Is this real?" The product was the most-awarded mask in the US in 2025. (Marketing Dive)

The NFL’s official presence (2019 to present). The league has posted from u/NFL since 2019, treating posts as community participation rather than promotion. Through three weeks of the 2025 season, engagement on NFL content was up 223% year over year, and r/NFL grew from 1.4 million subscribers at launch to roughly 14 million. (Sportico, 2025)

adidas: "You Got This" AMA series (2024). A first-of-its-kind AMA series with athletes aimed at Gen Z performance pressure, one of the highest-performing sports AMAs of 2024 and a Shorty Award winner, outperforming the brand’s other campaign elements on measurable brand association and favorability. (Shorty Awards)

Lenovo: Dynamic Product Ads (2024). In an October to December 2024 test of Reddit’s catalog-driven shopping ads, Lenovo saw a 7.4% lift in purchases, a 19.3% lift in page visits, and a 5% lift in add-to-carts. Advertisers running DPA alongside standard campaigns saw double the return on ad spend versus standard ads alone. (Retail Brew, 2025)

DocMorris: Max campaigns (2026). The European online pharmacy, an early adopter of Reddit’s AI-automated campaigns, cut cost per install 20% and purchase CPA 73%. (eMarketer, 2026)

AllTrails: app event optimization (2026). 28% lower start-trial CPA and 39% more trial conversions. (eMarketer, 2026)

Contiki: "Live the Legend." The youth travel brand paired category takeovers in travel subreddits with user-generated content and returned 305% return on ad spend with an 11% higher click-through rate than benchmarks. (Reddit for Business case data, republished by Brafton, 2025)

OREO x Star Wars. Auction ads plus a category takeover produced ad awareness 5x higher and aided brand awareness 14x higher than Reddit’s global CPG benchmarks. (Reddit for Business case data via Brafton, 2025)

Siemens: promoted AMA for employer brand (Germany). Employees discussing real jobs drew a 46% higher CTR and 24% more efficient CPC than the German benchmark. (Reddit for Business case data via Brafton, 2025)

Audi: "Think Faster" (2017 to 2018). The world’s fastest AMA: celebrities answered Redditors' questions live from an Audi at up to 130 mph. Episodes three and four drew 50.3 million impressions and 2 million views per episode, the canonical proof that a luxury brand could go native on Reddit. (Digiday, 2018)

Nissan: the Amazon gifting stunt (2013). Community managers asked Redditors "if you could have one thing from Amazon, what would it be?" and then bought the gifts, from a tablet to 4,500 ladybugs. The follow-up post hit #1 on Reddit’s front page, and Reddit’s own AMA coordinator called it one of the best campaigns the site had seen. (Digiday, 2013)

Findlay Hats: one post, $28,000 (2016). The founder posted a photo to r/pics about running into a stranger in Rome wearing one of his garage-made hats. No pitch. It hit the front page and drove $28,000 in sales and roughly 60,000 site visits from a single organic post. (Shopify, 2016)

An organic SEO and AI-visibility program (2025 to 2026). An agency built an authentic presence for a real-estate data company across 10 to 15 niche subreddits, no promotional tactics. Reddit referral traffic grew 642% year over year, monthly AI referral traffic grew 2,814%, and the site appeared in US AI Overviews for 136 keywords. (Diggity Marketing, 2026)

The AMAs That Made History

The classics

  • Barack Obama (2012, r/IAmA). A sitting president mid-campaign, and Reddit’s highest-traffic day to that point: 5.5 million pageviews on the post, over 200,000 concurrent visitors, 24,000+ comments, servers buckling. Still the most-cited proof of Reddit’s cultural reach. (The Next Web)
  • Bill Gates (2013 to 2023, 11 AMAs). The gold standard for a repeat guest: a yearly ritual answering on AI, climate, and TV shows alike. The lesson: showing up repeatedly and answering off-topic questions builds real equity. (GeekWire)
  • NASA’s Curiosity rover team (2012). A dozen scientists and engineers days after the Mars landing, nearly 6,000 questions and comments, proof that expert teams can hit celebrity-level engagement when the timing rides a cultural moment. (NBC News)
  • Chris Hadfield (2013). The first AMA conducted from space, answered from his sleep station on the ISS. (Forbes)
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger (2014). The model celebrity AMA: detailed answers, real engagement, and he stuck around afterward as a genuinely active Redditor. (transcript)
  • Elon Musk (2015). More than 8,000 comments in a few hours and the much-quoted "knowledge as a semantic tree" answer. (AmericaSpace)
  • Stephen Hawking (2015, r/science). His only AMA, run asynchronously because of his ALS, showing the format can flex for the guest and still command global press. (Bustle)

The famous lessons

  • Woody Harrelson’s "Rampart" AMA (2012). The canonical failure: 15 minutes, dodged everything not about his movie, and "Rampart" became the permanent shorthand for treating Reddit like a press junket. (Forbes)
  • Madonna (2013). Short, robotic answers timed to a launch. The community instantly smells an AMA that exists only to promote. (Salon)
  • Morgan Freeman (2014). Redditors concluded a publicist was answering for him, and the authenticity failure became the story. Ghost-written AMAs get caught. (HuffPost)
  • "AMAgeddon" (2015). When Reddit abruptly fired the employee who coordinated celebrity AMAs, moderators set over 1,400 subreddits private within 24 hours. AMAs ran on trust and human infrastructure, not just a text box. (Snopes)
  • The API-pricing AMA (2023). Reddit’s own CEO answered about 14 questions defending the API changes, every reply downvoted nearly invisible, fueling the 2023 blackout instead of calming it. Even the platform’s founder isn’t exempt from the format’s rules. (Engadget)

Recent (2023 to 2026)

  • Sam Altman and OpenAI executives (October 2024, r/ChatGPT). An AMA as a launch-week channel, mined by the press worldwide for roadmap signals. (AIwire)
  • Sam Altman again (January 2025, r/OpenAI). Days after DeepSeek rattled markets, his "wrong side of history" answer on open source led global business coverage. One AMA answer became a world news story. (TechCrunch)
  • AMA ads launch, with Sephora’s beta (January 2025). Reddit productized the format: brands can now promote and schedule AMAs as paid placements. Sephora’s beauty-director AMA beta pulled over 1,000 RSVPs. (MediaCat)
  • CEOs running standing shareholder AMAs (2025 to 2026). A Nasdaq-listed cannabis retailer’s CEO runs recurring investor AMAs on the company subreddit, and a fintech CEO defused a fee controversy in-thread. Reddit is becoming a standing executive channel, not a one-off stunt. (StockTitan)

Every Reddit Feature That Matters

The core platform

  • Subreddits: topic-based communities, each with its own rules, moderators, and culture. 100,000+ active.
  • Upvotes and downvotes: community voting that ranks every post and comment.
  • Karma: the cumulative reputation score that gates participation in many communities.
  • AMAs: Reddit’s signature live Q&A format.
  • Flair: labels on users and posts used for identity, filtering, and organization.
  • Awards: paid recognition users give to great posts, relaunched in 2023 and tied to contributor payouts.
  • Moderator tools: mod queue, removal reasons, ban tools, mod mail, rules engine, and insights dashboards.
  • AutoModerator: rule-based automation that filters, removes, flags, or responds to content automatically, standard in nearly every large community.
  • Community wikis: editable pages per subreddit for FAQs and resources (and a surprisingly powerful AI-citation source).
  • Polls: native multiple-choice voting posts.
  • Chat and live features: direct chat, community channels, and real-time discussion.
  • Custom feeds: user-built feeds combining multiple communities.
  • NSFW and spoiler tags: content-level gating for mature content and spoilers.
  • Crossposting: sharing a post into another community with attribution.
  • Reddit Premium: the ad-free paid subscription.
  • User profiles: post history, followers, avatars, and customization.
  • Saved posts and following: bookmarking and following individual users.

Recent and business-facing launches

  • Reddit Answers (December 2024). Reddit’s AI-powered conversational search, generating summaries of real conversations with links to the source posts. Growth was steep: roughly 1 million weekly users in early 2025 to 15 million by year end, with five new languages added. (TechCrunch, Search Engine Land)
  • Reddit Pro (March 2024). The free business toolkit: AI-powered trend and brand-mention insights, profile analytics, publishing tools, and a business profile. The publisher-focused Pro Tools added a Links tab, RSS import, and verification, with publisher post views up 46% after rollout. (TechCrunch, Press Gazette)
  • Dynamic Product Ads (GA May 2025). Catalog products served against relevant conversations, with a Shopify integration announced March 2026. Advertisers running DPA alongside standard campaigns saw 2x higher return on ad spend. (PPC Land)
  • Collection Ads and Shopping Listing Ads (March 2026). Shoppable carousels, plus Reddit’s first multi-advertiser format (in alpha). (Retail Brew)
  • AI shopping carousels in search (testing, February 2026). Product searches surface carousels of products actually mentioned in Reddit conversations, with pricing and purchase links. (TechCrunch)
  • Conversation Summary Add-ons (June 2025). An AI-generated summary of what Redditors like about a product, appended beneath an ad with a carousel of real posts. Early testing: 19% higher CTR than standard image ads. (Axios)
  • The AI ad generator and Redditor Highlights (June 2026). A free-form generator that builds Reddit-native ads from a brand’s site plus related conversations, and a format that embeds real positive Reddit posts into ads (10.7% average CTR lift at general availability). (Search Engine Land)
  • Reddit Insights / Community Intelligence (June 2025). Reddit’s AI social-listening and research suite, drawing on 22 billion+ posts and comments for real-time trend and brand-conversation data. (Axios)
  • Max Campaigns (beta, January 2026). Reddit’s AI-automated campaign type: targeting, bidding, creative rotation, and budget allocation, automated. Alpha testers averaged 17% lower CPA and 27% more conversions. (Social Media Today)
  • Lead Generation Ads (July 2024). In-platform lead forms with a Zapier integration to 7,000+ apps. A beta tester reported 30% lower cost per lead. (Swipe Insight)
  • Keyword and AI targeting (2024, expanded 2026). A unified flow combining keywords, communities, and interests, with AI keyword suggestions. (Search Engine Journal)
  • Devvit, the developer platform (beta). Third-party apps that run inside Reddit: games, utilities, and moderation tools. 2,000+ developers have shipped apps across 31,000+ communities, and Reddit’s Developer Funds pays for apps that hit engagement milestones. (Reddit Developer Platform)
  • Machine translation (2024). AI-powered automatic translation of posts and comments, expanded to 35+ countries, with translated content indexed by search engines. A stated growth driver, with international daily users growing 26%+. (TechCrunch)
  • The unified search revamp (2025 to 2026). Reddit Answers merging into core search, the search box front and center, and pilots of dynamic agents and non-text results. Reddit has said it will phase out the logged-in versus logged-out distinction in favor of AI-driven personalization. (TechCrunch)
  • Verified profiles (public beta, December 2025). A grey checkmark confirming a business’s or notable person’s identity, self-serve for organizations on Reddit Pro. Free and identity-only. (TechCrunch)
  • Community Funds (2022). Reddit’s $1 million per year grant program funding community projects, from $1,000 to $50,000 each. (TechCrunch)
  • The Contributor Program (2023). Eligible Redditors earn real money from gold awards on their posts and comments. (Reddit Help)
  • Safety filters (2024). An LLM-powered harassment filter trained on moderator actions, plus the reputation filter (built on Contributor Quality Score signals), ban-evasion filter, and mature-content filter. (The Register)
  • Paid subreddits (announced, not launched). Reddit has confirmed plans for exclusive-content communities as a creator-monetization play, while promising free Reddit continues unchanged. (The Register)
  • 2026 community updates. Video in comments rolled out to eligible communities, subreddit member counts replaced by 7-day "Visitors" and "Contributions" metrics, and a mobile test that pre-checks whether a draft post breaks community rules. (Reddit changelog)

A note on sourcing

Platform and financial figures come from Reddit’s SEC-filed shareholder letters and earnings transcripts, the primary sources. Survey data is labeled with its publisher, and Reddit-published research (the 9x faster and 15% more stats, for example) is marked as vendor data. Licensing deal values are press-reported estimates that Reddit has never officially confirmed. Reddit reports Q2 2026 earnings on July 30, 2026, which will supersede the Q1 figures above.