https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/what-primates-can-teach-us-about-social-media-marketing/

Three months ago, I wrote about the Reddit earnings story most marketers missed.

That first-quarter call wasn’t the financial story I expected, but looking back, it was Reddit putting the pieces of its future on the record: participation had become too difficult, community creation needed work, human conversation was becoming more valuable, and Reddit Answers could bring more of the search journey inside Reddit.

The second-quarter call made the larger strategy much easier to see: Reddit doesn’t want to remain only the site people reach after searching Google or the source an LLM summarizes before answering somewhere else. It wants to become the place people intentionally open, search, participate in, and return to every day.

Steve Huffman said it directly:

“We’re not building for drive-by traffic. We’re building a daily destination.”

The strategy is clear, but it creates a contradiction Reddit will have to solve: The company wants the world to come to Reddit, while moderators, community rules, automated detection, and platform-level enforcement are all designed to keep low-quality behavior out.

Those protections are necessary, but they can also remove content, ban people from individual communities, or suspend accounts before legitimate new people understand what they did wrong. As Reddit moves closer to becoming a daily destination, helping more people participate without lowering the quality of its conversations may become the most important factor in its long-term success.

Reddit Wants Search Visitors To Become Daily Users

Reddit reported revenue of $805 million, up 61% year over year, with 130.3 million global daily active uniques and 514.6 million weekly active uniques.

For marketers, the more useful number is 197.2 million U.S. weekly active uniques because Reddit already has enormous U.S. reach, and its challenge is getting more of those people to use Reddit directly and return more frequently.

That is why the app came up so often: Huffman said direct and app users are worth multiples more than search-referral traffic, and during a CNBC interview, he described direct app usage as where Reddit’s business lives.

Reddit also said new app-user retention improved 50% year over year on a relative basis, though it came from a small base and Huffman acknowledged absolute retention still has room to improve. Search has already given Reddit massive reach, so the next step is getting more of those people to open Reddit directly and come back.

What Marketers Need To Know

The Home Feed As Reddit’s Recommendation Engine

Huffman called the home feed Reddit’s primary app surface and one of the primary drivers of subreddit discovery. The important point isn’t simply that people can find new subreddits there. It’s that the feed now recommends conversations from communities a logged-in user never chose to follow.

For years, logged-out users could see popular content from across Reddit, while a logged-in user’s home feed mainly reflected the communities they had subscribed to. That has changed. Reddit is now using what it knows about someone’s interests and activity to recommend content from outside those subscriptions.

That broader reach is central to the work we do at OGS Media, where we look at how useful conversations reach people through Reddit’s home feed, Reddit Answers, search results, and LLM outputs.

Huffman also explained how much room the recommendation system has to improve. Its models currently incorporate 10% of user activity, update in days rather than hours or minutes, and select from posts published during the previous week.

That seven-day limit may be the more important signal. Reddit has 26 billion posts and comments, including advice, reviews, and conversations that remain valuable long after they were originally posted.

If Reddit expands that window, older conversations could return to the home feed whenever they become relevant to someone’s interests or current problem.

What Marketers Need To Know

Reddit’s home feed can now carry a useful conversation beyond the people who already follow that subreddit. But that doesn’t mean marketers should treat the feed like another distribution channel.

People go to Reddit because they want something different from blog content, search results, ads, or public reviews. Reposting the same marketing content misses the opportunity to become part of their validation journey.

Create conversations that fit the community, solve real problems, and earn engagement. Those are the conversations Reddit can recommend today and may be able to resurface for much longer in the future.

Reddit Answers Is Becoming One Of The Best Ways To Search Reddit

Reddit’s push to become a daily destination is especially clear in search, where the search bar is now universal in the app and both searchers and searches grew during the quarter.

Huffman said that, for a lot of the queries he runs, Reddit is now the best place to search Reddit. I agree with him based on how often I’ve been using Reddit Answers and how useful I find it for locating the conversations and perspectives I need. In a lot of cases, it gives me a better experience than searching Reddit through Google or asking an LLM.

That matters because, as Huffman told CNBC, “a summarization of Reddit isn’t Reddit.” People look for Reddit because they want different experiences, opinions, perspectives, and the conversation itself, not just a compressed answer taken from it.

Search results sent people into those conversations, while AI Overviews and LLMs can use Reddit content without sending people to Reddit or giving them the opportunity to participate, which is why Reddit wants more of that search experience to happen inside its own platform.

Reddit Is Making Conversations Easier To Consume

Reddit is also expanding the ways people can consume its conversations, with video in comments already accounting for more than 10% of Reddit’s video posts and Reddit expecting to test spoken or background-listening experiences later in 2026.

People often tell me Reddit doesn’t like video, but that has never been true. Written conversation is still its foundation, but credit goes to Rasha K. and Reddit’s APAC team for showing through their AMAs how video could add authenticity by making it clear the person answering was actually involved.

These formats give more people a way to use the conversations already there, including people who may never read a long thread. That broader access matters if Reddit is serious about its ambition to eventually reach one billion daily users.

Reddit Has To Balance Growth With Community Quality

Reddit is trying to make participation easier through new posting tools, better community recommendations, and LLM-assisted moderation that could replace some of the blunt account-age restrictions keeping legitimate new people out. Huffman acknowledged the problem directly when he said the account-age approach “has not aged well.”

That tension also came through in Reddit’s post-earnings AMA, where Huffman said its proactive systems prevent up to 23 million spam views and revoke nearly 2 million inauthentic votes every day.

Reddit clearly needs those protections, but working through this problem with Reddit and companies trying to participate responsibly has shown me how often legitimate people get caught between its growth goals and the systems designed to protect community quality.

Reddit has invested in Mod World and other moderator programs, but growth only works if its tools help moderators reduce spam, abuse, workload, and false positives enough to loosen blunt account-age restrictions safely.

The Destination Reddit Is Trying To Become

“Reddit has become the validation phase of the customer journey because people trust it.”

Bartosz Goralewicz, Co-Founder of OGS Media

Q1 showed that Reddit understood the barriers keeping people from participating. Q2 showed why removing them matters. Reddit doesn’t want to remain a source that Google and AI tools summarize before people move on. It wants to become the place people go to understand a problem, hear different perspectives, and decide what they trust.

Reddit isn’t a place to be summarized because its value isn’t a single answer. It’s the depth of the conversation, the disagreement, the lived experience, and the emotional validation people get from hearing others work through the same problem.

For marketers, the opportunity is to understand those conversations, help solve the problems inside them, and earn a place in the validation journey. That’s how a brand becomes part of the decision instead of another message people learn to ignore.

If Reddit can bring more people into that process without losing the quality of its human voices, it can move beyond being the source behind search and AI and become the destination people choose when they need to decide what to trust.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Brent Csutoras/Search Engine Journal

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/reddit-wants-to-be-the-destination-not-just-the-source-behind-search-ai/584586/

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/heads-up-and-hands-free-snaps-play-beyond-the-smartphone/

The joint statement confirmed that GARM will remain inactive as a result of the WFA’s settlement with X. No other concessions were discussed.

The rest of the statement claims that the settlement “resets the relationship between the two organizations,” which are now supposedly “fully aligned in the view that brands, platforms, and consumers will all benefit from brand-safety innovation.”

Additionally, the WFA said it is aligned with X on “its commitment to freedom of speech,” which seems to be a nod to the controversial reports on X content that Musk said triggered his “war” with advertisers. Those reports found that as hateful content was increasing on the platform, X ad controls weren’t working to stop big brands’ ads from appearing next to posts touting Hitler and the Nazi Party.

It’s unclear why advertisers settled, since a court ruled in March that the ad boycott was perfectly legal and X’s antitrust claims fell apart without proof of consumer harm. The next month, X appealed, but it appeared to be dragging its feet in filing a brief as an appellant, asking the court for an extension until August.

Perhaps settlement negotiations were already underway.

For Musk, the settlement comes shortly after the launch of X Money, a payments product offered through his social media platform that he hopes will help X be less reliant on advertisers for revenue.

Whether X Money can succeed at the scale required to meaningfully rival X’s advertising business will likely depend on X removing barriers to adoption. Those include the possibility that X Money transactions could be declined if an automated support error mistakenly suspends a user’s X account without warning. There’s also the simpler problem that X Money isn’t available in all 50 states.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/musk-went-to-war-sought-jail-time-for-x-ad-boycotts-but-case-ends-with-a-whimper/

Even for researchers who secure approval, “there’s no guarantee that the data is good,” said L. K. Seiling, coordinator of the DSA40 Collaboratory, a German initiative that tracks 46 DSA applications. API data is often difficult for a colleague to reproduce, so a researcher’s work cannot be checked for errors, which Iamnitchi said is a “basic requirement of science.”

DSA40 data shows that of 46 tracked applications, 20 were approved and 14 rejected. But approval rates vary widely: TikTok approved 11 of 13 applications, while X rejected 11 of 23. The true rejection rate is likely higher because the tracker relies on voluntary reporting, Seiling said.

“There’s no structured advantage for researchers to use this pathway,” Seiling said. “Data access as it’s set up right now tries to disincentivize researchers.”

A TikTok spokesperson told WIRED the company has given more than 1,500 research teams access to its tools, approved 130 applications in the EU in the second half of last year, and that its daily quota of 1,000 API requests lets researchers pull up to 100,000 video and comment records a day, or up to 2 million follower records. TikTok said it considers its research tools compliant with the DSA but “would welcome further public guidance.”

A Meta spokesperson said CrowdTangle covered only a fraction of the company’s public data, while the Meta Content Library and API that replaced it are “the most comprehensive research tools to date.” They cover Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Channels, and Threads with “robust privacy protections,” and qualified nonprofit researchers, including journalists, can apply.

There are few workarounds. Iamnitchi and Allen said they resort to scraping on the platforms that allow it, a time-consuming process that exports website data into spreadsheets. Even with sophisticated tools, scraping “is not very comprehensive,” Allen said. It cannot capture an account’s complete follower list, making coordinated disinformation networks difficult to map.

One way to challenge a rejected request is to take the platforms to court. Allen said DRI and the Society for Civil Rights applied for access to X’s API in April 2024 to study political discourse ahead of Germany’s federal election. X rejected the request in November, prompting DRI to sue in February 2025.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/big-tech-accused-of-stonewalling-european-social-media-researchers/

https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/social-marketing-that-moves-at-the-speed-of-sports/

As you may already know, Google recently updated Search Console to let brands track how their social media and video posts perform in search results.

Most marketers view this update as a helpful gift. They believe Google wants to reward brands that build strong footprints across TikTok, YouTube, and X. And not wanting to be glass-half-full, I think this is the positive optics Google was hoping for.

If you look past the official announcements, a different picture comes into focus; this update is a clever trap. It serves as a shield to hide the traffic loss caused by artificial intelligence while positioning creators into further training Google’s AI models.

Redefining Success In The Era Of Click Loss

To understand this strategy, you must look at the crisis Google faces with web publishers.

Generative search experiences and AI summaries answer user questions directly on the search page. This setup keeps users on Google instead of sending them to external websites.

Organic traffic to a company website was the main measure of marketing success, and a narrative we as an industry pinned to the mast for years as to whether or not we were justifying our budgets.

By tracking social media views inside Search Console, Google is trying to change the definition of success. If your website traffic drops by a third, Google can point to your social media data. They can show you that your TikTok videos received thousands of impressions on the search page; they want you to believe you are still winning, even if you do not get actual clicks.

It forces marketers to view Google as the central control room for all visibility, even when Google stops sending visitors to their websites, as they’re still providing visibility.

Outsourcing The Search Graph To Creators

The update also serves as a tool to train Google’s artificial intelligence and to power generative search, Google needs to understand the real world.

The engine maps relationships between people, brands, and topics. This process is called entity resolution.

Google needs to know who is an expert, what they write about, and whether they are a real person or just an automated spam site.

By encouraging you to verify your social accounts inside Search Console, Google makes you do their work. You hand over the exact connections they need, tell them that your website, your X profile, and your TikTok account are all the same entity.

Instead of Google guessing which profile belongs to which author, publishers hand-deliver verified identity maps. Google can then use this clean data to train its language models on who the true authorities are.

This Search Console update also ties in nicely with the initial release of Google Search Profiles, which feels like a modern re-spin of the authorship benefits of Google+.

The Human Trust Filter

Having verified data is essential in the age of generative text.

Anyone can build a website, buy a drop domain, and programmatically generate thousands of articles with AI, and inflate third-party authority metrics.

Social profiles with real human engagement are the best proof of life. Real companies and real brands operate across the multiple channels and have a form of pulse and presence outside their single web domain.

Google uses these connections as a trust filter to separate real brands from synthetic spam. You are giving Google the exact blueprints it needs to verify content ownership. This helps Google decide which sources are reliable and which sources are junk.

Looking at this cynically, the ability to verify social profiles in Google Search Console is an optics masterclass in platform survival.

It somewhat pacifies publishers by giving them new vanity metrics to track, and at the same time, it creates a new network for those same publishers to map the entity relationships that Google needs to build its AI future.

How Google Get Social Content

Google pulls social media posts into search engine results pages through a combination of live data firehoses, standard web crawling, and dynamic JavaScript rendering. The process differs based on the specific platform and user privacy settings.

Some of these data pipelines have been around for almost a decade, with the X (then Twitter) firehose deal coming into play in 2015.

This doesn’t mean that fresh posts are the only ones considered. In my own Search Console profile, I’m seeing X posts receiving clicks on Google that I posted in October 2024.

LLMs behave in a similar manner, and because of this we need to look at a post deprecation strategy.

Reviewing pricing prompts for one of our clients, I found that a couple of LLMs were returning pricing information from an X post advertising a student only offer from July 2022. This isn’t only misinformation, but can lead to a negative brand experience when a user clicks through expecting to receive one price, but find one substantially different.

Your Audience, Google’s Platform

The brands that win in this new landscape will not focus on these new Google metrics, but understand these are now another piece of the puzzle.

We need to stop treating Google as a neutral partner, as Google needs Search to bring people to the platform for Ads.

We should use our social channels to build a direct connection with your audience. Gather your community on platforms you control, rather than a search engine that wants to keep your visitors for itself.

More Resources:

Featured Image: beast01/Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-using-social-media-signals-to-mask-ai-search-click-loss/582227/

“We basically work from the assumption that if we want data, then we need to obtain it ourselves,” Sapiezynski said of their account cloning approach. “Even if we did, for example, want to use the official TikTok researcher API, none of the user agency is covered there. You can see what content is available, but you cannot see individual timelines that will tell you how the algorithm reacts to a particular user watching or not watching a particular video. Similarly, with the European Union’s researcher data access, all of this data can only be accessed aggregated and not from a perspective of a single user. So when you want to really study personalization, this research cannot be done on the aggregated data.”

Mind the gap

The team ran their experiments multiple times on the 90 cloned accounts and made side-by-side comparisons, using both implicit and explicit signals, to see how TikTok’s algorithm responded in terms of recommended content on the FYPs. They focused on three popular topics: cooking videos, fitness videos, and sports betting.

The “not interested” button proved most effective, reducing unwanted content by around 84 percent, compared to just a 48 percent reduction from merely skipping videos. “So if you don’t want to see something, you should be hitting that button,” said Kaplan. But the authors note that the “not interested” option seems to be deliberately hidden from users. And it was very easy for the algorithm to “relapse” into once again flooding an FYP with previously unwanted content; even a brief re-engagement by a user is sufficient.

“It turns out that it works in the beginning,” said Sapiezynski. “When you start saying, ‘I don’t want to see this particular topic,’ the platform might actually show you fewer of such pieces of content. But then the platform will slowly start putting it back in your feed. And if you don’t continue saying, ‘I really don’t want to see it,’ this may balloon back to the place where it was in the beginning. So the platform does react to your negative feedback, but then it also very much reacts to your express behavior. So if you are presented with this content again and you start watching it, the platform will again feed it to you more and more.”

In other words, be consistently very active with your feedback—constant vigilance!—when it comes to curating TikTok’s FYP. The researchers hope to test this hypothesis on real user data in the future. That said, “We can teach users how to use the platform better, but ultimately the way that you’re interfacing with the platform is going to be dictated by the design decisions that are fundamental to the platform,” said Kaplan.

Proceedings of the Twentieth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2026. DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v20i1.42688 (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/how-much-control-do-tiktok-users-really-have-over-fyps/

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/turning-cultural-moments-into-measurable-growth-with-tiktok-and-keurig-dr-pepper/

Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.

The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”

The Reddit employee wrote:

Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.

In a follow-up comment, boat-botany defined abusive behavior as that which violates Reddit’s rule prohibiting activity that interferes with the platform’s “normal use” or that “create[s] programs or applications” that break Reddit’s (controversial) API rules.

“By logging in, we get a lot more signal that allows us to detect whether an account is breaking the rules, and then we can block that traffic or enforce those accounts,” boat-botany said.

As of this writing, Ars was still able to use old.reddit.com without logging in.

The news is likely to upset some longtime Reddit users who have relied on old.reddit.com for a familiar look that they find easier to navigate and digest and who also want to view Reddit without logging in for convenience and/or privacy.

When a user asked boat-botany why New Reddit isn’t scraped as often as Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to a comment by another user.

“[T]he shape of malicious traffic is always changing,” the user, Nestramutat, wrote. “It’s going to be a constant cat and mouse game[.] As you ban one method, a new one gets developed. It’s easy to see abusive traffic in hindsight, but it’s harder to pre-emptively block it. Given that they’re claiming Old Reddit doesn’t have the modern security stack, this is likely proving to be an even greater challenge.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/