Reddit to shut down RSS feeds and end public API access

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is winding down support for RSS feeds, saying the format has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” RSS support will end on November 13, and the company also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API.

The company said it was grateful to everyone who had used RSS to stay connected with Reddit over the years, acknowledging the format’s place in the open web. RSS, a standardized web feed format that let users and apps follow site updates, was especially popular during the blogging era; Google once ran the most widely used RSS reader before shutting it down in 2013, ceding the market to Feedly and other independent apps.

The move comes as Reddit’s user-generated content has become a profitable side business through AI licensing deals: in its second quarter, the company said revenue from sources other than advertising grew 24% year-over-year to $43 million.

Moderators who relied on RSS for their own alerts are being pointed toward the Discord Relay Devvit app instead, and Reddit is urging moderators and their teams to migrate workflows before the November 13 shutdown. The company said there’s no replacement for RSS feeds used to follow content outside moderators’ own communities, and both moderators and users have already pushed back, warning that the change will make the platform harder to manage and access.

The end of public API access, set for March 2027, will affect any tool that relies on it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations — including social-listening products, research tools, and AI assistants that currently use Reddit to answer questions; those will need commercial deals with Reddit for its data after the cutoff. Reddit also said it’s adding safeguards to Old Reddit, its classic text-heavy interface, citing abusive scraping and automated traffic: within the next few months, it will limit logged-in access to users active on Old Reddit in the last 90 days. Developers with approved third-party apps and bots must register with Reddit by January 12, 2027, or lose API access after that date.

Why it matters

Reddit’s retreat from open, machine-readable access shows how AI-driven scraping is pushing platforms to wall off data that used to be free — a shift likely to accelerate the industry-wide move toward paid licensing deals for AI training and retrieval.