For years, Reddit has been where people go to ask the internet for help. Now it’s also where AI goes to learn how humans talk, think and decide what to buy.
Reddit has quickly become a key data source for AI search, with its billions of posts and comment threads feeding large language models with a healthy diet of colloquial speech and unvarnished opinions.
In 2024, Reddit signed two high-profile multimillion-dollar data licensing deals, one with Google and another with OpenAI.
“We have the biggest trove of human intelligence, and it continues to get wider and deeper,” says Reddit COO Jen Wong on this episode of AdExchanger Talks, recorded live in Cannes last week.
But as Reddit’s content shows up more often in LLM answers, the company is also reportedly exploring a usage-based model rather than paying a flat fee for access – a concept Wong wouldn’t be drawn out on.
“We’ve not publicly committed to any model or model change,” she says, but added (tantalizingly) that “the environment is dramatically different than when we did these partnerships two and a half years ago, right? We didn’t know that Reddit would be such a high portion of citations.”
So TBD on the long‑term pricing structure. But Wong was clear on one point, which is that whatever the economics look like, humans will remain at the center of Reddit’s value proposition. And that means keeping AI-generated junk from overwhelming the corpus that makes Reddit worth training on in the first place.
“We need and want humans on Reddit,” Wong says. “It’s human experiences in the real world that generate the posts and ideas on Reddit, and that is what’s important to us, because that’s aligned with our mission.”
Also in this episode: The role of community feedback to help build confidence in purchase decisions, how Reddit stops people from gaming its forums to manipulate AI search and Wong’s fascination with German internet memes. (There really is a subreddit for everything!)
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