From finding answers to giving them

Reddit's predicament illustrates a fundamental shift in digital marketing.

Google is moving from being primarily a platform that helps people find information towards being a platform that increasingly supplies the information itself.

For years, if you typed a question into Google, a Reddit thread was often the best answer, and you clicked through to read it. Now Google's AI reads the thread for you and puts the answer on the results page. Reddit's US daily users fell by 2.5 million in three months, mostly people who arrive from search without logging in. Its boss, Steve Huffman, put it plainly: AI Mode "used to be a traffic driver. Now it's not." The shares fell 29% on Friday, even though sales were up 53%.

That is useful for consumers and potentially valuable for Google. But it disrupts the economics of the businesses whose content makes the service useful in the first place. Reddit's threads help make Google's answers good. Google pays about $60 million a year to use them, a fraction of what the traffic was worth.

The old deal was simple. You let Google read your pages and Google sent you visitors. If that stops, sites will hold on to the people they have. Reddit already plans to test making people log in to read it. Expect more of that: logins, apps, licensing deals, and a slightly less open web.

For brands, the question changes too. If people get the answer without clicking, what matters is whether you're in the answer, and whether it gets you right. That's what I'm working on with L.E.N.