May 20, 2025

Is Reddit really feeling the pinch from Google Search?

Following up on Reddit’s slight miss on US DAUq in 1Q25, we took a look at how things are going QTD for Reddit. While Reddit started adding new users on a worldwide basis in April, the US has been a different story. Reddit’s downloads and DAUs have both been declining YoY since late last year.

Reddit: Worldwide Downloads - YoY Growth by Month

Reddit: US-only Downloads - YoY Growth by Month

Reddit: US-only DAUs - YoY Growth by Month

This paints a difficult picture for Reddit in its highest ARPU region. One key question we see getting asked, however, is if this is Reddit hitting market saturation or if this is due to Google’s change to search results (emphasizing Gemini, de-emphasizing Reddit). Our approach to answering questions like this one always starts with our cross-app data.

We pulled cross-app overlap for users of the Google Chrome app to see if they were using Reddit at the same rate as in past months. It looks like there was a sharp drop in Google Chrome users also using Reddit in October 2024, the first full month after Google started incorporating Gemini into search results. There was a bounce back after that initial drop, but April and May 2025 show another drop in Chrome users also using Reddit.

Please drop us a line if you want to investigate this more!