Reddit ends RSS feeds in November, citing scraping by AI bots
Reddit says RSS has become a common surface for large-scale scraping, and will end feeds on 13 November and its public API in March.
Reddit said it will end support for RSS feeds on 13 November, according to TechCrunch, because the feeds are a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. The company says it will also close its public API access in March 2027, which affects social listening tools, research applications and AI assistants that read Reddit.
Third-party developers have until 12 January 2027 to register, TechCrunch reported, and those who do not will lose API access. Reddit also plans to restrict old Reddit to logged-in moderators and users active in the past 90 days, which it says targets abusive scraping and automated traffic.
Moderators are pointed to the Discord Relay Devvit app for alerts, but TechCrunch said Reddit offers no replacement for people who read subreddits in external feed apps. Reddit said it knows RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time and thanked those who used it.
The move sits alongside Reddit's licensing business. TechCrunch reported that its other revenue, outside advertising, grew 24% year over year to $43 million in the second quarter of 2026, driven by AI licensing deals that use forum content. Reddit did not say in the coverage how the closures relate to those deals.
The claim that AI bots drove the decision is Reddit's own. TechCrunch did not report independent figures on how much scraping came through RSS, and it is not clear which bots Reddit means. Nobody else has confirmed the reasoning.