Steve Huffman spent part of Reddit's earnings call this week doing something CEOs of companies with a $60 million Google licensing deal usually avoid: he said out loud that Google's AI Overviews has not been worth much to the people whose content feeds it. His exact framing, per Ars Technica's writeup, was that "10 blue links has driven tremendous value and growth to the broader ecosystem" while "AI Overviews has yet to make a similar level of positive impact," and that as businesses, publishers, and retailers, "we're still looking for that win-win."

Reddit's stock was falling while he said it. That matters, because you should read a CEO's complaint about a partner during a bad quarter with one eyebrow up. But you should also notice he is not the only one saying it, and he is saying it while sitting on the single largest pile of human-written discussion on the internet, which is exactly the raw material AI answers are built from.

What was actually said, and by whom

Three separate things happened, and they are worth keeping apart.

First, Reddit's letter to investors argued that Reddit is "the antidote to an automated web," that AI compresses the internet into summaries, and that "people don't want a summary of Reddit; they want Reddit." That is positioning. It is a good line. It is also a sales pitch to shareholders who are watching an AI-summarized web eat referral traffic.

Second, in comments around the report, Huffman made the narrower and more checkable claim above about AI Overviews not producing the ecosystem value that ordinary search links did.

Third, the money context: Reddit has a roughly $60 million licensing arrangement with Google, and per a Wall Street Journal report from earlier this month, Reddit has been weighing whether to end it. That same report named The Economist, Reuters, Politico, and USA Today as publishers considering similar moves. Reddit also licenses to OpenAI. So this is not one CEO venting. It is a group of content owners renegotiating in public.

Google's position is the opposite, and it is on the record. When a Pew Research study of data from 900 US adults concluded AI Overviews cut clickthrough to sites by roughly half compared with the plain-links layout, Google told Ars the study used "a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic," and said it had "not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic." Google followed up with its own blog post arguing total organic click volume to websites has been relatively stable year over year, and that the clicks that do land are higher quality.

Both of those can be true at once, which is the part nobody enjoys. Aggregate clicks across the entire web can hold steady while the clicks to your specific informational article fall off a cliff, because the aggregate includes commercial queries, navigational queries, and every retailer and directory on the internet. "Total organic click volume is stable" is a fleet-level number. You do not run a fleet. You run one site.

What I actually believe here

I do not have Google's internal dashboards and neither does Huffman, so anyone telling you they know the exact number is guessing. Here is what I will commit to.

Informational, top-of-funnel, "what is X" traffic is the part getting absorbed. That is the traffic where a summary genuinely answers the question and the user has no reason to click. If your site's traffic is mostly definitions and roundups, you are exposed, and no amount of arguing about methodology changes that.

Traffic tied to a decision, a purchase, a specific tool, or a real first-hand account is holding up better, because a summary of an opinion is a bad substitute for the opinion. That is precisely why Reddit's "people want Reddit, not a summary of Reddit" line lands even when you discount the self-interest.

And the licensing fight is the tell. If AI answers were reliably sending publishers value, publishers would not be lining up to walk away from deals that pay them. Verdict: Huffman is directionally right, self-interested, and worth listening to anyway.

What to do about your own site this month

You do not need a strategy deck. You need four things checked.

Separate your traffic by intent, not by page. Pull your top 50 landing pages and mark each one as definition, comparison, how-to, or opinion. Watch the definition bucket. If it is sliding while the rest holds, you are seeing the AI Overviews effect and not a general decline, and the fix is different for each bucket.

Stop writing the pages a summary can replace. If a competent model can answer your headline in three sentences from general knowledge, that article is not an asset anymore. The pages that keep earning clicks are the ones carrying something the model does not have: your prices, your test results, your screenshots, your failure story. We put this same argument in plainer terms when LinkedIn shipped its AI slop report button — machine-generated middle-of-the-road content is now the default, so the differentiated thing is evidence.

Own a channel that does not route through search. Email, a real community, a podcast, referrals from customers. This is unglamorous and it is the entire ballgame. Every business I have watched get hurt by an algorithm change had one intake path. Same lesson as the one behind after-hours lead capture: a single point of failure between you and the customer will eventually fail.

Instrument before you react. Most people rebuild their content strategy off a vibe and a bad week. Get the measurement in place, give it 60 days, then move. If you want the structured version of finding where demand is quietly leaving your business, the revenue leak walkthrough is the same exercise applied to leads instead of pageviews.

The honest tradeoff

There is a version of this where Google is right. Search behavior has changed before, publishers have screamed before, and the web adjusted. AI Overviews may genuinely be sending fewer but better-qualified clicks, and a site built on thin informational pages may just be losing traffic it was never going to convert anyway. I do not think that is the whole story, but I am not going to pretend it is impossible.

What I will not do is plan around Google's number. Google's incentive is to report a stable, healthy web. Reddit's incentive is to make AI summarization sound like theft. My incentive is that my traffic pays my bills, so I plan for the pessimistic case and get pleasantly surprised.

Plain verdict: assume informational search traffic keeps shrinking, move your effort to pages carrying proof, and build one channel that Google cannot reprice. If the optimists are right, you have lost nothing. All gravy.