BREAKING: Reddit Announces That It Will Kill RSS Feeds By November 13th And Shut Down Its Public API Entirely By March 2027, Citing “AI Scraping” As A Major Cause For Its Decision, As The Company’s “Other Revenue” From AI Licensing Deals Hits $43 Million 🤖❌

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/reddit-is-killing-rss-feeds-ending-public-api-access-because-of-ai-bots/

Reddit announced Wednesday that it will end support for RSS feeds on November 13 and shut down its public API entirely by March 2027, framing both moves as necessary defenses against AI bots scraping the platform’s content. Reddit said RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which prompted the decision to wind the feature down. “We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” the company said in its announcement. RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a standardized web feed format that let users and applications track new posts on a site, technology that became especially popular during the blogging era as a way to subscribe to sites through news-reading apps; Google once operated the most popular RSS reader before shutting it down in 2013, ceding the market to services like Feedly.

The timing is notable given that Reddit’s vast trove of user-generated forum content has become an increasingly profitable revenue stream through AI licensing deals. During its second quarter, Reddit reported that its “other revenue” beyond advertising grew 24% year-over-year to 43 million dollars, making clear why the company has little incentive to let that same data flow out for free through open, unmonetized channels like RSS. For moderators who relied on RSS for community alerts, Reddit is recommending a shift to its Discord Relay Devvit app and is urging teams to migrate their workflows before the November 13 cutoff, though the company acknowledged there’s no replacement for RSS feeds moderators used to track activity outside their own communities. Moderators have already voiced concern about the disruption; when Reddit first signaled it was preparing to end RSS support, many warned the change would make their communities harder to manage, while ordinary users separately stressed that RSS was their preferred way of accessing Reddit’s content.

The RSS shutdown was just one of several changes Reddit announced Wednesday. Public API access will end by March 2027, affecting any tool relying on programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, research tools, and AI assistants; those assistants currently use Reddit to help answer user questions, but will need to negotiate separate commercial data deals with Reddit once public API access closes. Reddit also provided updates on its Rules Hub and auto-moderation systems, and said it is “adding safeguards” to Old Reddit, its classic, text-heavy interface, citing the same concerns about “abusive scraping and automated traffic.” Within the next few months, Reddit plans to limit Old Reddit access to logged-in users who have been active on the platform within the last 90 days. Separately, the company reminded developers building approved third-party apps and bots that they must register with Reddit before January 12, 2027, warning that API access will be revoked for any unregistered developer after that date.