New AI‑Powered Shopping Feature Marks Reddit’s First Major Step Toward Community‑Driven Commerce Integration

Social news aggregation and forum social media platform Reddit announced that it is piloting an AI‑powered shopping feature that converts community product recommendations into buyable carousels with pricing and retailer links, signaling a move to integrate commerce more directly into the platform’s search experience. 

In an announcement, the company explained that users frequently turn to Reddit for opinions, reviews, and purchasing advice, and the new system is designed to translate those conversations into actionable shopping options by drawing from product catalogs supplied by selected Shopping and Dynamic Product Ads partners. For a limited group of US users, relevant search queries will now display interactive carousels containing images, prices, and direct purchase links, appearing in searches for items such as noise‑canceling headphones or electronics‑related gift ideas.

The test feature identifies products mentioned organically in posts and comments, presenting them at the bottom of search results with additional details accessible through a product card. 

Users can then navigate to participating retailers to learn more or complete a purchase. During the initial phase, the experiment focuses on consumer electronics, combining community‑sourced recommendations with catalog data from advertising partners. 

Reddit emphasized that the feature is built around surfacing items most frequently endorsed in discussions, aiming to make navigation more intuitive while preserving the platform’s community‑driven character. The company plans to observe how users interact with the tool and refine the experience as testing continues.

AI‑Driven Shopping Expands As Major Platforms Accelerate Integration Of Conversational Commerce Tools

Reddit’s move follows a broader industry trend in which major platforms are embedding AI‑driven shopping into their ecosystems. TikTok and Instagram have long offered integrated commerce features, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently introduced an “Instant Checkout” function enabling purchases from Etsy and Shopify within conversations. 

The announcement also aligns with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s recent comments that AI‑enhanced search represents a major opportunity for the company, both as a product improvement and a revenue driver. Steve Huffman noted that weekly active search users increased from 60 million to 80 million over the past year, while usage of the AI‑powered Reddit Answers feature grew from 1 million to 15 million between the first and fourth quarters of 2025.

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