Reddit and Google have teamed up to enhance the Reddit Answers functionality by incorporating the Gemini AI assistant into its Vertex AI system. This new update aims to make finding answers faster and more efficient as users navigate through the vast content of over 100,000 Reddit communities.

Reddit Answers, which began testing in December 2024, serves as the community-driven platform’s dedicated AI tool that responds to user queries using data from discussions on Reddit. The recent integration with Google’s Gemini AI represents a significant advancement, improving the relevance of search results and providing quicker answers.

This enhancement follows Reddit’s earlier collaboration with Google Cloud to utilize its Vertex AI platform for developing AI agents. Matt Snelham, Reddit’s SVP of Infrastructure, emphasized that this integration brings Google-level innovation to Reddit, resulting in better search results and increased user engagement on the platform.

Currently, Reddit Answers is still in the beta phase and is not universally available. Launched in late 2024, the Answers functionality aims to help users efficiently find information, recommendations, and discussions directly from the platform’s communities, thus reducing the need to search on external sites.

The Gemini integration allows Reddit Answers to provide not just accurate searches but also summaries, follow-up questions, and an interactive conversation experience about the queried content. This move positions Reddit to better compete with other generative AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that typically utilize similar data sources.

At present, the early access version of Reddit Answers is only available in English on web and iOS platforms within the US, and there has been no announcement regarding its expansion to a broader audience.