If your Google reporting starts and ends with rankings, Reddit just showed you what that misses.
Reddit told investors that search engine referrals fell by more than one million a week in October, according to Reuters. Yet the DataForSEO data AEO Sherpa pulled shows reddit.com with 10.70 million #1 Google rankings in the US this month, up 39 percent from 7.70 million in May.
Rankings rose while referrals fell. I think that makes Reddit a clear case of a site that keeps its positions and still gets fewer visits.
CEO Steve Huffman laid out the drop on the company's third-quarter call on October 29, 2026, and both CNBC and Reuters reported it. CNBC also reported that Reddit beat revenue estimates, at $895 million against $878 million expected, while its fourth-quarter forecast came in below Wall Street's.
Huffman told CNBC that Google referral traffic went "down meaningfully in this quarter" because of the "shift to AI mode and AI overviews." On the analyst call he went further. According to Reuters, he said "the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody."
He also told analysts that Google is "crawling us as hard as ever," Reuters reports, which he took to mean Google's side of the demand had not changed.
Then I looked at the ranking side. On October 31, 2026, AEO Sherpa pulled the historical rank overview for reddit.com in the US from DataForSEO Labs, a commercial SEO data provider. It counts the keywords in its own database where Reddit ranks first. That is a measure of breadth, not of clicks, and it covers May to October 2026 only.
That count rose from 7,701,570 in May to 9,385,559 in August. It peaked at 10,944,455 in September and stood at 10,701,494 in October, a partial month.
DataForSEO also estimates the domain's traffic value, and that figure fell from 2.40 billion in June to 2.15 billion in October. It comes from a click model that may not reflect AI Overviews. I treat it as a hint, not a measurement.
Not everyone puts the drop on AI Mode. The investor behind @modestproposal1 wrote on October 31 that "AI Overviews are clearly reducing outbound traffic, but somewhat missing from the Reddit conversation is just how much traffic Google suddenly started directing to Reddit in late 2023 and 2024 from search ranking changes."
That camp sees part of the loss as an earlier boost fading. My data starts in May and cannot say whether that is happening. It does show Reddit holding far more first-place positions than it did then, and a rank count cannot show a click lost to an AI answer.
The other camp says AI Mode ends referrals for any site that is not a destination. BuccoCapital Bloke, another investor posting on X, wrote that "AI Mode provides rich info and data in line, less incentive to leave search ... This is a massive headwind to all media type companies who are not destinations."
Reddit's own mix of users points the same way. Reuters says Huffman put logged-in users at over 80 percent of the company's monetization, and Audit The Herd, an investor on X, wrote that "US logged in held up while the bleed was in logged out." CNBC says Reddit will start testing a login requirement outside the US in the fourth quarter.
If the lost visitors are the ones Reddit earned least from, revenue and traffic can both tell the truth. Revenue beat estimates while US daily active uniques fell 2 percent to 50.7 million, CNBC reports.
My read is that a rank count cannot tell you whether search is paying you back. Reddit's count went up while its referrals went down, and the gap between the two is where AI Overviews and AI Mode sit. The next test is clicks per ranking and how often AI answers cite the page, and I would run it on my own data before I trusted any position report.
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