Published: October 1, 2026 · Last updated: October 1, 2026
TL;DR: Reddit is shutting down RSS feeds on November 13 and closing its public API by March 2027, saying both have become magnets for AI scraping it can’t control.
RSS has survived longer than most of the internet it was built for. Reddit just decided it’s not worth protecting anymore.
The company announced on September 30 that it will discontinue RSS feeds entirely on November 13, 2026, and shut down public API access by March 2027. Developers who want to keep any kind of programmatic access have until January 12, 2027, to register before the door closes. Reddit’s stated reason is blunt: RSS has become, in the company’s words, “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.”
Translation: AI companies have been quietly pulling Reddit content through RSS and public API endpoints to train models, and Reddit would rather that happen through licensing deals it gets paid for. The company’s “other revenue,” the bucket that includes AI licensing agreements built on user-generated content, grew 24 percent year over year to $43 million in the second quarter of 2026 alone. RSS feeds don’t generate a cent of that. They just give the content away for free to anyone with a script.
Reddit tried to soften the announcement with a line that reads like it was written for a goodbye card: “We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit.” Moderators weren’t in a sentimental mood. Plenty flagged that RSS and the public API are load-bearing infrastructure for how they manage communities, track new posts, and run bots that keep subreddits from descending into chaos. Losing that access doesn’t just inconvenience casual readers, it breaks tooling that mod teams built years ago and never expected to lose.
This is part of a pattern that’s been building since generative AI made every platform’s content a potential training asset. Reddit signed licensing deals with Google and OpenAI back in 2024, and has spent the time since tightening every other door that let data out for free. RSS was one of the last ones standing, mostly because closing it annoys real users more than it stops a determined scraper, who can usually find another way in anyway. Reddit is betting that trade-off is worth it now.
For anyone who still used Reddit’s RSS feeds the old-fashioned way, to read posts in a feed reader without opening the app, the message is clear: that era is ending in six weeks, and there’s no indication Reddit plans to offer a replacement.
Related: Google’s AI Mode Will Now Watch the Web for You, Whether You Pay for It or Not and California Finally Banned AI From Firing You Solo, a Year After Newsom Killed the First Try.
Bottom Line: Reddit isn’t wrong that AI scraping got out of hand, but shutting off RSS punishes the moderators and casual readers who relied on it honestly, while anyone determined enough to scrape at scale will find another way in regardless.
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