Reddit will end RSS feeds and its public API, citing large-scale scraping by AI bots
RSS support ends on November 13 and the public API shuts down in March 2027, as data licensing becomes a growing source of revenue for the company.
On Wednesday Reddit announced that it is ending support for RSS feeds. The company says RSS has become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." TechCrunch reports that RSS support will stop on November 13, and that Reddit gave a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API. The changes came alongside a set of updates for moderators and developers. RSS is a standardized web feed that lets people and applications follow updates to a site. It is widely used by news-reader apps and long associated with the open web. Reddit acknowledged that, saying RSS has been "a beloved part of the open web for a long time" and thanking those who used it. TechCrunch links the move to the commercial value of Reddit's user-generated content, which the company licenses to AI developers. In its second quarter, Reddit reported that "other revenue" beyond advertising grew 24 percent year over year to $43 million. Shutting down free access points narrows the ways AI crawlers can collect that content without a deal. It also affects ordinary users, independent feed readers and third-party developers who rely on RSS or the public API to follow communities and build tools.