Reddit is turning to passkeys as a core defence against bots on the platform, positioning them as both a security and growth lever. Steven Huffman, Reddit’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), said during the company’s Q1FY26 earnings call that passkeys are “the lightest-weight and most privacy- and user-acceptable way of doing human verification” and “a more secure way of logging in, an easier way of logging in”. He added that the move will “help us just grow login users in general” while strengthening bot defences. “All of this work is underway,” Huffman said, adding that more features are expected this quarter.
What Reddit said about bots: Huffman framed bot control as both a transparency and safety issue. “We have what we call good bots on Reddit,” he said, referring to the tools moderators use to run communities. Reddit is shifting these to its developer platform so they can be “labeled on Reddit more transparently” while allowing the company to “batten down the hatches more on unauthorized bot usage.” He said this is “part of the human verification and defense of Reddit.”
AI and ads: Jennifer Wong, Reddit’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), said AI is central to Reddit’s ad stack. “Our strategy is to integrate more automation and AI into our ad stack,” she said, pointing to Reddit Max, which “launched to beta in early Q1”.
Wong said advertisers are seeing “a 17% reduction in cost per action and 25% more conversion outcomes” on Max campaigns, with “about 50% of Max campaign advertisers using AI-powered creative features”.
Despite this push, Wong said Reddit is not chasing higher ad density. “Our strategy is not to increase ad load,” she said, noting it remains “quite low compared to peers”. Instead, Reddit is focused on making “the value of every impression more valuable” through machine learning, better targeting, and more advertiser competition.
AI tools: what Reddit has launched and is building
AI, data licensing, and Reddit’s leverage: Reddit is also positioning itself as a critical data layer for AI. Huffman said Reddit has “more than two decades of human conversation” and “over 25 billion posts and comments,” adding that “there is no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence, and that comes from Reddit.”
He said Reddit remains “the most cited source in AI citations across all platforms” and argued that demand for human input is rising as AI content proliferates. “The more it becomes sanitized and summarised and optimised for attention by AI, the more that people crave the human,” Huffman said.
On partnerships, Huffman said Reddit’s deals with Google and OpenAI are “very meaningful” and “mutual”, but indicated scope for more. “It’s citations, it’s mind share, it’s just general partnership,” he said, adding these relationships help Reddit bring in users and build its own AI tools, including machine translation and LLM-powered onboarding. However, he declined to comment on exclusivity in future deals.
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