Reddit kills RSS and shuts public API over AI bots

The platform announced yesterday it will drop RSS feed support on November 13 and close public API access by March 2027, cutting off external tools, researchers and AI products from the conversations inside its forums.

RSS — Really Simple Syndication — lets users subscribe to site updates through an outside news reader without ever visiting the site. Reddit says the format has become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," so it's pulling the plug. The company acknowledges RSS was "a beloved part of the open web for a long time," then sets a shutdown date without offering an alternative for users who consumed feeds outside moderation communities.

The money behind the move is straightforward. In the second quarter Reddit reported "other revenue," mainly data-licensing deals for language models, up 24% year over year to $43 million. When user-generated content becomes a sellable product, the incentive to allow free access via RSS or public API disappears. The bots that scraped those feeds for free now compete directly with the company's new business model.

Third-party app developers and approved bots must register with Reddit by January 12, 2027 or lose access. Researchers, social-listening tools and AI assistants that rely on the public API today will have to sign commercial agreements or walk away from the data. Moderators who received alerts through RSS channels are pointed to the Discord Relay Devvit app, but Reddit admits there is no replacement for other feed uses.

Old Reddit, the text-heavy classic version, will be limited in the coming months to logged-in users who have used it in the past 90 days — a step Reddit frames as protection against "abusive scraping and automated traffic." At the same time the company is updating its Rules Hub and AutoMod tooling, but the bottom line is clear: the open web that once was Reddit's heart is closing, and data access is moving behind a paywall.