Reddit Kills RSS Feeds and Its Public API Over AI Scraping

Reddit is shutting two of the oldest doors into its content. In posts to r/modnews and r/redditdev on 30 September, the company said RSS feeds will stop working on 13 November and that its public Data API will be wound down, with all remaining access gone by March 2027. The reason, Reddit says, is that RSS has become “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” as TechCrunch reported. Old Reddit is also being limited to logged-in users who have been active in the past six months.

The API shutdown comes in stages. Reddit stops accepting new public API requests on 31 October. From 12 January 2027, apps and users that have not registered or answered the company’s outreach begin losing access, and in March everyone still on the public API is cut off. Developers are being pushed toward Devvit, Reddit’s own platform for apps that run inside the site, with a $1 million migration fund that pays $1,000 to each eligible app that makes the move, plus free hosting. According to Decrypt, more than 14,000 apps have already registered, and popular tools such as RemindMeBot are close to finishing the switch.

For RSS, there is no such path. Reddit says that for anyone following communities they do not moderate, “there is no replacement.” Moderators who used feeds for alerts are being pointed to a Devvit app that relays posts to Discord. Researchers keep a route through Reddit for Researchers, a free program for approved non-commercial academic projects that serves data via Google’s BigQuery. Feed readers, social-listening tools and the many AI assistants that quietly read Reddit through its open endpoints lose theirs.

The AI angle is the whole point. Reddit’s archive of human conversation is some of the most valuable training and search material on the web, and the company now sells it. Google pays an estimated $60 million a year, OpenAI has its own deal for real-time access, and both agreements are untouched by the change. Reddit’s “other revenue” line, which is mostly data licensing, grew 24% to $43 million in the second quarter. At the same time it is in court with Anthropic and with Perplexity, where an August ruling let its anti-circumvention claims proceed. Closing the free routes makes the paid one the only one.

Long-time users have seen this before. In 2023, Reddit’s steep new API prices killed popular third-party apps such as Apollo and sparked a site-wide moderator blackout. This time the cost is narrower but more absolute: RSS readers simply stop, and any tool that is not registered, or not paying, goes dark. Search engines and chatbots without a licence will have to rely on whatever they already collected, which for a site whose value lies in fresh answers to today’s questions may not be worth much for long.