Reddit kills RSS feeds in November and will end public API access by March 2027

Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds on November 13 and will terminate all remaining public API access by March 2027. The company framed both moves as a response to scraping, blaming automated traffic and AI crawlers for forcing the changes. According to TechCrunch, which covered Reddit's Wednesday announcement, the company said RSS had turned into what it called a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse."

RSS support ends November 13

RSS, the syndication format that rose to prominence during the blogging era, lets people follow site updates in dedicated news-reading apps instead of visiting each site directly. TechCrunch notes that many users said following Reddit through RSS was their preferred way to read the platform at all.

For moderators who relied on RSS feeds as an alerting mechanism, Reddit is pointing to the Discord Relay Devvit app as a replacement and asking them to migrate their workflows before the November 13 cutoff. The company acknowledged, however, that there is no substitute for feeds people followed outside communities they moderate. Pushback has already arrived: TechCrunch reports that when Reddit signaled earlier that RSS was on the way out, many moderators warned the site would become harder to manage, while regular users stressed that RSS was central to how they consumed Reddit in the first place.

Public API access winds down

The RSS shutdown accompanies a larger change: the end of Reddit's public API. TechCrunch reports that all public API access will end by March 2027, affecting tools that programmatically read Reddit conversations, including social listening products, academic research tools, and AI assistants. Assistants that currently pull answers from Reddit will need commercial agreements with the company to keep doing so after the closure.

Developers building approved third-party apps and bots face an earlier deadline. Reddit said they must register with the company by January 12, 2027; after that date, any developer who has not registered will lose API access.

Old Reddit gets a stricter gate

The stripped-down "Old Reddit" interface is being locked down in parallel. According to The Verge, Reddit recently began requiring logins to use Old Reddit, and in the coming months logged-in users will additionally need a record of recent Old Reddit activity to keep browsing it. The Verge reports the recency window as six months, while TechCrunch reports 90 days; the two outlets disagree on the exact threshold. Logged-in moderators will be exempt from the recency requirement.

The Verge observes that the change appears designed to stop bots from creating fresh accounts or leveraging dormant ones. It also marks a shift in tone from CEO Steve Huffman, who said in May 2025 that Reddit would keep the old interface alive as long as people were using it, but said this past August that Old Reddit had become a favorite tool of spammers and scrapers.

Part of a longer campaign

These restrictions did not appear in isolation. As The Verge notes, Reddit has already blocked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from capturing its pages, sued Anthropic over alleged unauthorized bot access, and signed data-licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. TechCrunch adds the financial backdrop: Reddit's "other revenue" beyond advertising, the segment that includes its AI data deals, grew 24 percent year over year to $43 million in its second quarter.

Why it matters

Reddit hosts some of the internet's densest archives of human conversation, and it is now walling them off. Killing RSS removes one of the last standardized, permissionless ways to follow a major site, while ending public API access means independent researchers, hobbyist tool builders, and smaller AI companies must either pay or go without. Moderators and longtime readers lose workflows they built over years, and the open web loses another on-ramp, even as the same data stays available to anyone willing to sign a licensing check. Reddit's case is a clear illustration of how AI scraping has become the justification for closing platforms that once ran on openness.