By Krystal Scanlon • July 15, 2026 •
Reddit execs are “intensely debating” whether feeding ChatGPT is eating its own ad business.
At Cannes, a top Reddit advertising executive admitted something the company has mostly avoided saying out loud: it doesn’t yet know whether selling its community data to train ChatGPT and Gemini is undercutting the very data advantage its own ad-targeting business is built on.
“It’s definitely something that we’re intensely debating,” said Reddit’s evp ads monetization, Roelof van Zwol, when asked directly whether Reddit’s content-licensing deals with OpenAI and Google compete with its advertising business — a business increasingly sold to marketers on the premise that Reddit’s community conversations offer targeting signal no other platform can replicate.
It’s a notable admission for a company whose entire pitch to advertisers over the past two years has rested on the idea that Reddit’s data is uniquely its own. Reddit Max, the company’s automated ad-buying and targeting product, and Reddit Community Intelligence, its insights layer for advertisers, are both built on the premise that Reddit understands “contextual intent” — what people are actually discussing, not just what they click — better than any other platform. That’s the same underlying pool of posts and comments Reddit sells access to so OpenAI and Google can train their models.
