Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots
Reddit ends RSS on November 13 and public API access in March 2027, restricts Old Reddit to logged-in users, citing large-scale scraping and abuse.
Reddit announced sweeping cuts to its open interfaces on September 30: RSS feeds stop on November 13, public API access ends in March 2027, Old Reddit becomes available only to logged-in moderators and users active in the past six months, and third-party apps and bots must register by January 12, 2027. Reddit says RSS had become “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” while acknowledging it “has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time.”
Facts
- Timeline: RSS closes November 13, 2026; public API ends March 2027, with research, social-listening and AI uses moved to commercial data licensing; third-party app and bot registration deadline is January 12, 2027.
- Old Reddit: relaxed from the originally floated 90-day window to moderators plus anyone who used it in the last six months.
- Driver: AI-scale scraping; data licensing is now real revenue — “other revenue” hit $43M in Q2 2026, up 24% year over year.
- Announcements: made in r/modnews and r/redditdev posts.
Editorial take
The internet’s largest UGC corpus is closing to the open web: November 13 is the first deadline for aggregation, monitoring and dataset pipelines built on RSS, and March 2027 is the end of the road for the public API. The realistic options are self-hosted collection (compliance risk on you), a commercial data deal, or alternative crawlable sources — teams building training sets or community monitoring should audit their Reddit dependencies now.