Reddit to End RSS Feeds and Public API Access, Citing AI Scraping

Reddit announced in September 2026 that it will shut down RSS feed support on November 13, 2026, and end public API access by March 2027, citing widespread automated scraping and abuse driven by AI bots.

The company said RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” prompting the decision to wind down the feature. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a standardized web feed format that allows users and applications to receive updates from websites — a tool that gained widespread popularity during the blogging era and remains used by news-reading apps such as Feedly.

The end of public API access will affect a broad range of tools that rely on programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, academic research tools, and AI assistants. After the March 2027 cutoff, those AI products will need to enter commercial licensing deals with Reddit to continue accessing its data — a business that has already become significant for the company. In its second quarter, Reddit reported that “other revenue” beyond advertising grew 24% year-over-year to $43 million.

For moderators who used RSS for community alerts, Reddit is recommending a migration to the Discord Relay Devvit app before the November 13 shutdown. The company acknowledged there is no replacement for RSS feeds used outside of moderators’ own communities. Moderators have already expressed concern that losing RSS access could make managing their communities more difficult.

Reddit also announced restrictions to Old Reddit, its text-heavy legacy interface, limiting access to logged-in moderators and users who have visited the version within the last 90 days — changes the company also attributed to “abusive scraping and automated traffic.”

Developers building approved third-party apps and bots have until January 12, 2027, to register with Reddit or risk losing API access entirely.