Oct 30 (Reuters) - Reddit shares tumbled 29% on Friday, marking their biggest single-day drop and hitting their lowest level in over a year, after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic and could shrink its user base.

The online discussion platform still appears in Google search results but is attracting fewer clicks, as users increasingly rely on the tech giant’s AI tools for direct answers.

"When more than a million search referrals a week disappear because Google’s AI answers the question itself, investors are no longer looking just at the next three or four months, but at how much of Reddit’s audience it will really own in the years ahead," said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com.

Reddit warned that its daily active unique visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if referral traffic kept declining.

If current losses hold, Reddit is set to lose more than $7 billion in market value and Pinterest about $900 million. The two stocks have fallen about 44% and 23%, respectively, this year through their last close.

Reddit has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.03, compared with Snap’s 7.53 and Pinterest’s 8.48, according to LSEG data.

Separately, Reddit on Friday said it has extended its cloud services agreement with Google through 2029, committing to spend $580 million over three years.

At least 11 brokerages cut their price targets on Reddit, and at least 13 did so on Pinterest.

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[–] 1 point 1 week ago

What I wonder is whether Google's ad revenue was doomed or not.

It seems like they shot themselves in the foot by having a LLM answer when you did a basic web search instead of just showing the websites. But, my guess is that they think that nobody wants that, and that if they only offered old-style search all their customers would switch to using OpenAI or Anthropic's "web search". At least by offering LLM garbage themselves, some people are still searching on Google, so there's a chance they'll see an ad.

I don't know. I am not a normal user, and I'm out of touch with what normal people want. I have things set up so a firefox dynamic bookmark / keyword search thing uses the "udm=14" trick to go straight to the "web" tab in the Google results and not show the AI overview. But, I'm probably among only 0.001% of users who have done something like that.

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