SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 30, Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on Nov. 13, 2026, and fully close public API access by March 2027, framing the open protocols in posts to r/modnews and r/redditdev as a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” For moderators who relied on RSS to track subreddits they don’t run, the company offered a terse concession: “there is no replacement.”

The sequencing is a deliberate squeeze on AI developers. New requests for public API access close Oct. 31, 2026. Registration for Reddit’s $1 million App Migration Program ends Nov. 30, with $1,000 payments per eligible app that moves to the Devvit-based Developer Platform; more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered. On Jan. 12, 2027, Reddit begins stripping access from anyone who didn’t respond, with progress updates slated for Nov. 10 and Feb. 23.

The business logic is legible in the earnings. Reddit’s “other revenue,” which includes data licensing, hit $43 million in Q2, up 24 percent year over year. Chief Executive Steve Huffman told the May call that approved bots would migrate to the Developer Platform while unauthorized scraping gets squeezed. A roughly $60 million-a-year Google deal in early 2024 and a subsequent OpenAI agreement established the price. The lawsuits set the floor: Reddit sued Anthropic in June 2025, alleging bots hit its servers more than 100,000 times after being told to stop, then sued Perplexity and three scraping firms in October 2025.

For small businesses, the window to audit which Reddit threads shape AI answers is closing. AI platforms already churn 39 percent of cited brands weekly, and the 11-million-citation study presented at BrightonSEO suggests Reddit sits near the top of that mix. Reddit also extended its logged-in Old Reddit throttle from an initial 90 days to six months.

The open web didn’t die. It got priced.

Sources