Reddit is jumping into the AI shopping game with a new search feature that converts community recommendations into product carousels complete with pricing and buy-now buttons. A small test group of U.S. users will now see these interactive shopping displays when searching for product advice on the platform.
The timing here isn’t subtle. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman just finished telling investors last week that AI search could be the company’s next big money maker. Search users on the platform jumped from 60 million to 80 million weekly actives over the past year, and their AI-powered Reddit Answers feature exploded from 1 million to 15 million users between Q1 and Q4 of 2025.
So naturally, it’s time to monetize that growth.
How the Shopping Feature Actually Works
When test users search for something like “best noise-canceling headphones” or “electronic gift ideas for a college student,” they’ll see a carousel at the bottom of results showing products that real users mentioned in threads and comments. Click on a product and you get details before being shuttled off to a retailer to complete the purchase.
Reddit says this feature “surfaces top-recommended products directly from discussions” while keeping community perspectives central to the experience. The company launched Dynamic Product Ads last year, which already shows personalized product recommendations based on user interests, so this feels like the next logical step in their e-commerce push.
The technology mines actual conversations for product mentions rather than just serving up sponsored content, which at least maintains some connection to what makes Reddit useful in the first place. People genuinely do go there asking “what’s the best [insert product category]” and trust the community’s collective wisdom more than traditional advertising.
Following the Shopping Feature Playbook
Reddit is late to this party. TikTok and Instagram have had shopping features baked into their platforms for years. OpenAI rolled out “Instant Checkout” for ChatGPT last September, letting users buy from Etsy and Shopify without leaving their conversations.
Every platform with eyeballs and engagement is trying to become a shopping destination. The business logic is straightforward: why send users to Amazon when you could capture that transaction yourself and take a cut?
But Reddit’s user base has always been different. The platform built its reputation on authentic discussions and community-driven content, not influencer marketing and sponsored posts. There’s a real question about whether Reddit’s audience will embrace shopping features or see them as another step toward the platform becoming just another ad-heavy social network.
The company says it will “continue learning from how people use this new feature and refine the experience over time,” which is corporate speak for “we’re not sure if this will work but we need to try something to justify our valuation.”
The Authenticity Problem
Here’s where things get tricky. Reddit’s value comes from unfiltered opinions and real user experiences. When you ask for headphone recommendations on Reddit, you expect to get honest answers from people who actually use those headphones, not affiliate marketers gaming the system.
Adding direct shopping links creates obvious incentives for bad actors to manipulate discussions. Will Reddit be able to distinguish between genuine recommendations and astroturfing? The platform already struggles with bot accounts and promotional content disguised as authentic posts.
The test is happening with “shopping and advertising partners,” which suggests some level of curation or partnership deals. That means not every product mentioned in comments will show up in these carousels, only ones from partners Reddit has commercial relationships with. So much for surfacing what the community actually recommends.
Reddit says these are products “directly mentioned by users from conversations,” but filtered through partnerships with retailers. That’s a pretty significant asterisk on the whole “community perspectives at the center” promise. The feature might surface genuine recommendations, but only if those products happen to come from the right retail partners.
It’s the classic tension between building useful features and maximizing revenue, and Reddit is betting it can walk that line without alienating the users who made the platform valuable in the first place.
