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VIEW PASSES Reddit execs are “intensely debating” whether feeding ChatGPT is eating its own ad business.
At Cannes, a top Reddit advertising executive admitted something the company has mostly avoided saying out loud: it doesn’t yet know whether selling its community data to train ChatGPT and Gemini is undercutting the very data advantage its own ad-targeting business is built on.
“It’s definitely something that we’re intensely debating,” said Reddit’s evp ads monetization, Roelof van Zwol, when asked directly whether Reddit’s content-licensing deals with OpenAI and Google compete with its advertising business — a business increasingly sold to marketers on the premise that Reddit’s community conversations offer targeting signal no other platform can replicate.
It’s a notable admission for a company whose entire pitch to advertisers over the past two years has rested on the idea that Reddit’s data is uniquely its own. Reddit Max, the company’s automated ad-buying and targeting product, and Reddit Community Intelligence, its insights layer for advertisers, are both built on the premise that Reddit understands “contextual intent” — what people are actually discussing, not just what they click — better than any other platform. That’s the same underlying pool of posts and comments Reddit sells access to so OpenAI and Google can train their models.
Van Zwol’s working answer, for now, is that the two aren’t really pulling from the same layer: what gets licensed out is raw content, while what powers Reddit’s own ad targeting is a different signal entirely — how users actually engage with that content and with ads on the platform. “We don’t share all that,” he said, calling it “a fundamental difference.” But he stopped short of calling the question resolved, adding: “I want to be humble in the sense, like we’re still working, we’re a very young platform.”
The broader debate
The admission lands at the tail end of a debate that outside observers — and even Reddit’s own CEO Steve Huffman — have been circling for some time, just from different angles.
Huffman has publicly described a related “paradox”: Reddit’s content fuels external AI systems even as Reddit deploys AI internally to run its own business. He’s also said Reddit wants to prevent companies it licenses data to, from using it to identify or target Reddit’s own users, or to disintermediate the platform entirely — a downstream-control concern, not a cannibalization one.
Analysts have raised a related but distinct risk: that AI-powered search and answer engines could erode Reddit’s own organic traffic and ad business over time, even as licensing fees from those same AI companies climb — a traffic-cannibalization concern that shows up in Reddit’s own risk disclosures.
What’s new here is narrower and more internal than either of those: not “will AI search steal our users” but “does the data we’re selling to train AI models undercut the data moat our own ad product depends on.” That’s a product-architecture question, and hearing an executive concede Reddit is still debating it internally — rather than offering a firm, rehearsed answer — is a more specific and more citable data point than what’s been said publicly to date.
The differentiation point for advertisers
Reddit has spent the past two years convincing marketers that its ad products work precisely because its data is unlike anyone else’s since it’s rooted in real, human, contextual conversation rather than passive behavioral signal. That pitch is central to Reddit Max’s growth and to the “halo effect” advertisers increasingly cite for spending on Reddit at all — the belief that showing up authentically in Reddit communities improves their odds of being cited in AI-generated answers.
Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis made the point that Reddit’s business is less vulnerable to AI disintermediation than platforms built around identity-based targeting.
“Reddit’s use of interest-based rather than identity-based targeting flattens the differences in value between frequent and non-frequent users compared to other platforms,” she said. “While the ad impressions that ChatGPT disintermediates will be more valuable for Reddit than for identity-based advertisers, Reddit’s interest-based product is well-placed to capitalize on any high-intent non-logged-in traffic funnelled through by ChatGPT.”
If Reddit itself isn’t certain whether licensing that same data pool to the AI companies producing those answers dilutes its own targeting edge, that’s a fair question for any advertiser weighing how durable Reddit’s differentiation really is — especially as AI search reshapes where and how people research purchases in the first place.
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