Reddit Wants Google to Send Users Back After Feeding AI Their Content

Reddit is back at the negotiating table with Google, and this time they’re not just asking for more money – they want users. The platform is reportedly pushing for a new kind of AI licensing deal that goes beyond the typical “pay us for our data” arrangement into something more like “pay us AND help us not die in the process.”

According to Bloomberg, Reddit executives are eyeing a much bigger role in Google’s AI ecosystem, one year after their initial $60 million annual data deal. The key twist? They want Google to actively funnel users back to Reddit’s forums after serving up AI-generated answers sourced from Reddit posts. (Because what good is getting paid for your data if the AI kills your traffic in the process?)

Here’s the thing: Reddit is in a uniquely strong position to make these demands. Their content has become absolutely critical to AI training – we’re talking about real people having genuine conversations, sorted by topic, and ranked by actual humans rather than algorithms. Data suggests Reddit is the most-cited domain for AI tools like Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. Adding “reddit” to Google searches has basically become the internet’s unofficial “show me real answers” hack.

Reddit is also reportedly considering dynamic pricing for future deals, where payments would fluctuate based on how useful or important their content is to AI-generated responses. It’s like surge pricing, but for your forum posts about the best pizza in Brooklyn or why your houseplant keeps dying.

This negotiation highlights the central paradox of AI licensing deals: platforms like Reddit hold treasure troves of data that tech companies desperately need, but those same AI models are strangling the traffic and engagement that made the data valuable in the first place. Users get their Reddit-sourced answer from Google’s AI and never actually visit Reddit – which means fewer posts, less engagement, and ultimately less valuable data for future deals.

The push for traffic-sharing arrangements shows content platforms are waking up to this dynamic. They’re realizing that selling their data is only sustainable if they can maintain the communities that generate new data. It’s not enough to get paid once for existing content; you need to preserve the ecosystem that creates tomorrow’s content.

What’s particularly smart about Reddit’s approach is recognizing they have leverage. In an internet increasingly filled with AI-generated content and SEO spam, genuine human discussions become more valuable, not less. Reddit’s voting system, topic organization, and community moderation create exactly the kind of high-quality, contextual data that AI companies need but can’t easily replicate.

Whether Google agrees to these terms remains to be seen, but this negotiation could set a precedent for how content platforms and AI companies structure future partnerships. Because at some point, everyone’s going to need to figure out how to feed the AI without killing the golden goose that lays the data eggs.

Read more from Bloomberg and The Verge

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