Reddit has announced that it will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 and fully close public access to its data API by March 2027, in what the company describes as a response to large-scale scraping and automated abuse, largely driven by AI bots. The move closes the last free pathways for outside tools, researchers and feed readers to pull Reddit content.
A phased shutdown
Reddit announced the changes on September 30 in posts on r/modnews and r/redditdev, setting out a clear timetable:
- October 31, 2026 — Reddit stops accepting new requests for public API access
- November 13, 2026 — support for RSS feeds ends
- November 30, 2026 — registration closes for the platform's migration funding
- January 12, 2027 — Reddit begins cutting off apps and users that have not registered or engaged with it
- March 2027 — public API access ends for all remaining apps and users
The company said RSS has become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." Moderators who use RSS for alerts will be pointed to Discord Relay, an app on Reddit's Developer Platform — but for anyone reading Reddit through feed apps or using the feeds outside a community they moderate, Reddit admits there is no replacement.
The developer platform push
Reddit wants third-party apps and bots to move to Devvit, its managed Developer Platform, where the platform hosts the apps itself. A $1 million App Migration Program pays $1,000 to each eligible app that migrates, plus free hosting and technical support. More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far, though Reddit itself acknowledged that "capability gaps" remain for some migrations.
In parallel, access to Old Reddit is being tightened: within the next few months, only logged-in users who have used Old Reddit in the last six months will keep access, with moderators exempt.
Why the data is being walled off
The shutdown caps a multi-year effort to monetise Reddit's user-generated content. The platform now licenses its data to AI companies — Google and OpenAI are its largest buyers — and its "other revenue" line, which includes data licensing, grew 24 per cent year-on-year to $43 million in the second quarter of 2026. Those paid agreements are unaffected by the shutdown.
The history of the squeeze is well documented: paid API pricing in June 2023 triggered mass subreddit protests; a roughly $60-million-a-year AI training deal with Google followed in February 2024; an OpenAI data partnership in May 2024; crawler rules were tightened; Anthropic was sued in June 2025 and Perplexity AI and other scrapers in October 2025; the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was blocked in August 2025; and approved bots got labels in March 2026.
What remains unanswered: whether academic researchers get any access route outside commercial deals — neither announcement mentions research — and what "engaging" with Reddit means for the January 12 cutoff.
Sources: Reddit to shut RSS feeds, close public API as bots scrape its data — MediaNama, Reddit RSS and Public API Shutdown: Key Deadlines — TechRepublic
A phased shutdown
Reddit announced the changes on September 30 in posts on r/modnews and r/redditdev, setting out a clear timetable:
- October 31, 2026 — Reddit stops accepting new requests for public API access
- November 13, 2026 — support for RSS feeds ends
- November 30, 2026 — registration closes for the platform's migration funding
- January 12, 2027 — Reddit begins cutting off apps and users that have not registered or engaged with it
- March 2027 — public API access ends for all remaining apps and users
The company said RSS has become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." Moderators who use RSS for alerts will be pointed to Discord Relay, an app on Reddit's Developer Platform — but for anyone reading Reddit through feed apps or using the feeds outside a community they moderate, Reddit admits there is no replacement.
The developer platform push
Reddit wants third-party apps and bots to move to Devvit, its managed Developer Platform, where the platform hosts the apps itself. A $1 million App Migration Program pays $1,000 to each eligible app that migrates, plus free hosting and technical support. More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far, though Reddit itself acknowledged that "capability gaps" remain for some migrations.
In parallel, access to Old Reddit is being tightened: within the next few months, only logged-in users who have used Old Reddit in the last six months will keep access, with moderators exempt.
Why the data is being walled off
The shutdown caps a multi-year effort to monetise Reddit's user-generated content. The platform now licenses its data to AI companies — Google and OpenAI are its largest buyers — and its "other revenue" line, which includes data licensing, grew 24 per cent year-on-year to $43 million in the second quarter of 2026. Those paid agreements are unaffected by the shutdown.
The history of the squeeze is well documented: paid API pricing in June 2023 triggered mass subreddit protests; a roughly $60-million-a-year AI training deal with Google followed in February 2024; an OpenAI data partnership in May 2024; crawler rules were tightened; Anthropic was sued in June 2025 and Perplexity AI and other scrapers in October 2025; the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was blocked in August 2025; and approved bots got labels in March 2026.
What remains unanswered: whether academic researchers get any access route outside commercial deals — neither announcement mentions research — and what "engaging" with Reddit means for the January 12 cutoff.
Sources: Reddit to shut RSS feeds, close public API as bots scrape its data — MediaNama, Reddit RSS and Public API Shutdown: Key Deadlines — TechRepublic
