Reddit announced it will stop supporting RSS feeds starting November 13, and its public API will shut down entirely by March 2027. Third-party apps and bots that want to keep calling the API must register and get approved by January 12, 2027, or lose access. TechCrunch was first to report the change on September 30.
Reddit's stated reason is abuse. The announcement says RSS has become:
"a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse"
The report singles out AI bots as the target. Reddit also acknowledged that RSS has long been popular on the open web, writing, "We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time."
Who gets hit
Moderators are the most directly affected group. Many rely on RSS to push new posts and reports into their own tools. Reddit's proposed replacement is a Discord Relay app built on its Devvit developer framework, which forwards notifications to Discord.
Outside the moderator community, Reddit isn't offering a substitute. Ordinary readers who follow a subreddit through an RSS reader, sentiment-monitoring tools, academic researchers, and developers building AI assistants that need to scrape discussion threads are all on the list of those affected. Once the public API closes, programmatic access will only have two paths left: a registered and approved app, or a commercial data-licensing deal negotiated directly with Reddit.
What the approval criteria are, whether registered apps will have to pay, and how quotas will be calculated — none of that has been disclosed yet.
A step-by-step tightening
String together Reddit's moves over the past few years and the direction hasn't changed.
In 2023, Reddit announced it would start charging for large-scale API calls. The popular third-party client Apollo shut down because it couldn't afford the fees, and thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. Reddit didn't budge.
In 2024, Reddit struck data deals with Google and OpenAI in succession. Google reportedly pays around $60 million a year for training data and search improvements, though neither company has disclosed the figure. Reddit also went public that year, and data licensing became part of the revenue story in its IPO filing.
In 2025, Reddit took unpaid scrapers to court, suing Anthropic, then suing Perplexity and several data companies that scrape search results on others' behalf.
In 2026, it's RSS and the public API's turn. The earlier steps targeted high-volume commercial users; this one lowers the bar to everyone.
Data is revenue
The numbers TechCrunch cites explain why Reddit is doing this: in the second quarter, Reddit's "other revenue" outside advertising was $43 million, up 24% year over year, with most of it coming from AI data licensing. That's small next to advertising, but the margins are high, and the customers are exactly the model companies most starved for conversational data.
Every extra day RSS and the public API stay open is another day someone can get the same data without going through a licensing deal. Shutting them down, from this angle, is protecting a business that's still growing.
What it means for the open web
RSS is one of the few public interfaces left over from the early web era, and when a big site shuts it down it usually doesn't cause much of a stir, because few people still use it day to day. Reddit is different — its posts have long been a frequent reference point for Google search results and AI-generated answers, and plenty of small developer tools are built on top of its RSS feed.
After this change, where Reddit's content flows will narrow: either through Reddit's own app, or through paid licensing into a handful of companies' models. Developers with Reddit RSS-based aggregation or monitoring projects need to find an alternative before November 13 — by the announcement's own timeline, that leaves just over six weeks to migrate.
Sources: TechCrunch report, Reddit's official announcement, CocoLoop, Slashdot discussion; shutdown dates and the registration deadline follow Reddit's announcement, and the other-revenue figures follow TechCrunch's citation of the Q2 earnings report.