Reddit on Thursday said it's moving to become a primarily logged-in experience, marking one of the most significant shifts in its 21-year history.

Why it matters: Reddit has long championed the open web. Now, it's pushing to build a more direct relationship with users while also protecting its data from increased scraping in the AI era.

Driving the news: In an interview Thursday, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said the company is making the change to improve its user experience, bolster its ads business and prevent bots from scraping its proprietary data.

Chief operating officer Jen Wong told Axios the move doesn't represent a change in strategy as the company has always focused on building a direct destination.

"It's just that in the last 10 years, because our [data] corpus was open, we got a lot of search traffic, so that became part of the equation" but didn't change the company's mission.

Zoom in: Huffman expressed confidence that the change would ultimately improve engagement and…