Reddit Is Killing RSS Feeds and Public API Access to Fight AI Scrapers

Reddit is shutting two of the main ways outsiders pull data from the site. The company said in an announcement yesterday that RSS feeds will stop working on November 13, and public access to its API closes in March 2027.

“In August, we shared plans to modernize Reddit’s infrastructure, build better mod tools, and make it harder for bad actors to scrape Reddit and abuse communities. Today, we have specifics on what’s changing, when, and how to plan ahead,” Reddit said.

RSS is a simple feed that lets an app check a page for new posts automatically. An API, short for application programming interface, is a front door that lets software request data straight from a service. Both are how a lot of third-party tools, bots, and alerts have worked for years.

The stated reason for shutting this down is scraping—bots that copy huge amounts of content automatically—plus what Reddit calls automated abuse.

New requests for public API access end October 31. Apps and users who haven’t registered or answered Reddit’s outreach start losing access on January 12, 2027, and everyone left is cut off in March.

Reddit wants developers to rebuild on its Developer Platform, called Devvit, and is offering a $1 million App Migration Program. That includes $1,000 payments for eligible apps that move over and free hosting, with applications due November 30.

More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far. Reddit says popular ones like DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot, and RemindMeBot have finished or nearly finished migrating.

For moderators who get alerts through RSS, Reddit points to a Devvit app called Discord Relay.

For RSS use outside a community you moderate, “there is no replacement,” the company says.

Old Reddit, the older version of the site that many longtime users prefer, is next. In the coming months it will be limited to logged-in users who touched it in the last six months, while moderators keep access regardless.

But why, though?

For users trying to understand the logic, it can be summed up in two words: data and money.

Reddit holds years of real people answering real questions: which phone to buy, how to fix a leaking pipe, whether a symptom is worth a doctor visit.

Back in 2023, Reddit started charging developers for API access, and thousands of subreddits went dark in protest.

Then, Reddit signed a roughly $60 million-a-year licensing agreement with Google in early 2024, letting it train AI models on Reddit posts—feeding them text so they learn to write and answer questions.

A deal with OpenAI followed that May.

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Those who didn’t sign formal agreements ended up in court. Reddit took Anthropic, the company behind Claude, to court in June 2025, alleging its bots hit Reddit servers more than 100,000 times after it said it had stopped.

In October 2025 it went after Perplexity and three data-scraping firms, accusing them of getting around its protections. Perplexity and SerpApi have pushed back on the claims.

Scrapers have also learned to hide. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, accused Perplexity in August 2025 of disguising its crawlers as ordinary Chrome browsers to get past blocks. Perplexity disputes the claim.

Reddit says logged-out access was the biggest source of abusive scraping on Old Reddit. A bot that looks like a person is hard to stop at the door, which is why the login requirement came first.

For regular users, the practical risk is losing the small tools that make Reddit usable: reminder bots, mod helpers, alert feeds. If an app’s maker doesn’t migrate, it goes dark.

The first cutoff for existing unregistered apps is January 12, 2027, and the migration fund closes to applicants on November 30, 2026.