Reddit RSS feeds will stop working on 13 November 2026, and the public API that third-party apps, bots and researchers have used for years will close completely in March 2027. Reddit announced both changes on Wednesday 30 September 2026 in two posts, one to moderators in r/modnews and one to developers in r/redditdev. Its stated reason is blunt: RSS has become “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse”, and much of that scraping now feeds AI systems.
The announcement also limits Old Reddit to recent users, switches off AutoModerator’s enforcement tools for new communities, and sets a hard registration deadline for every bot on the site. Taken together, it is the last step in a three-year effort to turn Reddit’s conversations from a free public resource into a product it sells.
This article sets out exactly what changes and when, why Reddit says it is acting, how the move fits its data business, who loses most, whether it will actually stop AI scrapers, and what moderators, developers and businesses should do before the deadlines. For the wider fight over who gets paid when AI reads the web, see our analysis of Cloudflare’s plan to save the web from AI.
Table of contents
- What Reddit Announced About Reddit RSS Feeds
- The Full Timeline for Reddit RSS Feeds and the API
- Why Reddit Says It Is Ending Reddit RSS Feeds
- How Closing Reddit RSS Feeds Fits Reddit’s Data Business
- Who Loses When Reddit RSS Feeds Go Dark
- Will Ending Reddit RSS Feeds Actually Stop AI Scrapers?
- What to Do Before Reddit RSS Feeds Shut Down
- Reddit RSS Feeds FAQ
- References and Further Reading
What Reddit Announced About Reddit RSS Feeds
The changes arrived in a moderator post titled “Continuing our infrastructure updates: What’s changing in the coming months”, published at 17:41 UTC, and a developer post titled “Moving Data API Apps to the Developer Platform”, published four minutes earlier. Both build on plans Reddit first described in August.
The 13 November cut-off
The moderator post is direct: “Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we’ll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.” That gives users 44 days from the announcement. Every Reddit RSS feeds endpoint, from a subreddit’s new posts to a user’s comments, is covered.
What Reddit offers moderators instead
For moderators who use feeds to watch their own communities, Reddit recommends Discord Relay, an app built on its Developer Platform, known as Devvit. It forwards selected activity from a subreddit into a Discord channel. Reddit asks mod teams to “review your setup and migrate workflows before November 13” so that alerts are not interrupted.
The users with no replacement
Everyone else is out of luck. Reddit’s own words are: “If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement.” That sentence covers the people who read Reddit RSS feeds in apps such as Feedly, Inoreader or NetNewsWire, journalists tracking topics, and small tools that turned subreddits into newsletters. Reddit closed the section with a short farewell: “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.”
How we read the announcement
There is an irony worth recording. When we tried to read Reddit’s announcement threads programmatically for this article, the web pages and the JSON versions returned a “blocked by network security” page to unauthenticated requests. The Reddit RSS feeds for the same threads still loaded, with the full post text and the top comments. Until 13 November, the feed is the most open door Reddit has left.
The Full Timeline for Reddit RSS Feeds and the API
The RSS deadline is the first of several. The developer post lists the public API dates in a table, and the moderator post adds the Old Reddit and AutoModerator changes. We have combined them below, with the number of days from the 30 September announcement worked out from the calendar.
| Date | What happens | Days after announcement |
|---|---|---|
| 31 October 2026 | No new requests for public API access accepted | 31 |
| 10 November 2026 | Migration progress update and reminder | 41 |
| 13 November 2026 | Reddit RSS feeds stop working | 44 |
| 30 November 2026 | Registration for the migration bounty closes | 61 |
| 12 January 2027 | API access starts closing for unregistered apps and users | 104 |
| 23 February 2027 | Further progress update and reminder | 146 |
| March 2027 | Public API access closes for all remaining apps and users | 152 to 182 |
| “Next few months” | Old Reddit limited to users active there in the last six months | Not dated |
Five dates for developers
The developer timeline is phased so that the quiet apps go first. From 31 October, nobody new can apply for public API access. From 12 January 2027, Reddit “will begin removing API access for apps and users that haven’t registered or engaged with us”. In March 2027, “remaining public API access will end”. Reddit has not named a day in March, so the closure could land anywhere between 152 and 182 days after the announcement.
The $1M App Migration Program
Reddit is paying developers to move. Its $1M App Migration Program offers $1,000 for each eligible app that successfully migrates to Devvit, access to Reddit Developer Funds, free hosting, migration guides, office hours and “additional support for critical moderation and community apps”. Applications go through the app registration form and must arrive by 30 November 2026 to be considered for the bounty.
Progress so far
Reddit says more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered. It names three high-activity bots whose moves are “completed or near-complete”: DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot and RemindMeBot. It has also received more than 100 submissions from moderators whose communities depend on a bot with no known owner.
Days of notice from the 30 September announcement (our calendar arithmetic; March 2027 shown at 1 March, the earliest possible date)
Old Reddit and AutoModerator
Two further changes ride along. Old Reddit, the text-heavy classic site, already requires a login. In “the next few months” Reddit will limit it to logged-in users who have used it in the last six months; moderators are exempt. TechCrunch reports that Reddit changed that window from 90 days to six months just as the news went out. Separately, newly created communities, and communities that have never used AutoModerator, lose its enforcement actions: Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as spam and Approve. Rules Hub and Automations become the default instead.
Why Reddit Says It Is Ending Reddit RSS Feeds
Reddit frames every part of this announcement as security. The moderator post opens by recalling August plans to “make it harder for bad actors to scrape Reddit and abuse communities”, and the Old Reddit change is justified by “abusive scraping and automated traffic”.
A feed is an easy target
Reddit presents the whole package as a cybersecurity and platform-integrity measure rather than a business decision. An RSS feed is a machine-readable summary of new content, published at a predictable address and designed to be polled. That is exactly what makes it useful to a reader app, and exactly what makes it useful to a scraper. Reddit RSS feeds needed no login, no API key and no registration, so they offered a way to collect posts at scale without any of the accountability that Reddit now attaches to its API.
The May warning
The move was signposted. On 28 May 2026 Reddit posted “Protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse” in r/modnews. It updated Rule 8 (“don’t break the site”) to cover coordinated account creation and API misuse, announced the shutdown of unauthenticated .json endpoints, and added: “While we’re at it, another common surface for scraping is RSS.” It asked moderators how they used feeds. A thread in r/rss the next day, titled “Reddit officially admits to prepping the end of RSS feeds”, drew replies such as “Without RSS feeds Reddit would be unmanageable for me.”
The AI angle
Reddit’s posts do not name AI companies, but the context is plain. Every large language model is trained on web text, and Reddit is one of the richest sources of human conversation online. AI assistants also search Reddit live to answer questions. TechCrunch notes that, after the public API closes, those assistants “will need commercial deals with Reddit for its data”. Closing Reddit RSS feeds removes one of the last free routes in.
How Closing Reddit RSS Feeds Fits Reddit's Data Business
The security argument is real, but it is not the only one. Reddit now earns money from licensing its data, and every free access route it closes makes a paid licence more valuable.
The revenue behind the decision
In its second-quarter 2026 results, Reddit reported that “other revenue”, the line that sits outside advertising and includes data licensing, grew 24% year on year to $43 million. Working backwards from those two figures, the same line was about $34.7 million a year earlier. That is still small next to advertising, but it is growing, and it depends on Reddit’s data being scarce.
Reddit “other revenue”, second quarter, $ million (Q2 2026 reported; Q2 2025 implied by our arithmetic: 43 / 1.24 = 34.7)
2023: the API price that broke the apps
The story starts in 2023, when Reddit began charging for heavy API use at $0.24 per 1,000 calls. Christian Selig, developer of the popular Apollo app, said the new pricing would cost him about $20 million a year, and Apollo shut down on 30 June 2023 along with several other third-party clients. Thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. Reddit kept the pricing.
2024: licensing deals
In February 2024, ahead of its stock market listing, Reddit signed a data licensing agreement with Google, reported by Reuters to be worth about $60 million a year. In May 2024 it announced a partnership with OpenAI. These deals put a price on the very content that Reddit RSS feeds were handing out for free.
2025: suing the scrapers
In 2025 Reddit went to court. In June it sued Anthropic, alleging that the company’s bots had kept accessing the site after being asked to stop. In October it sued Perplexity and three firms that sell scraped search data, including Oxylabs and AWMProxy, accusing them of harvesting Reddit content through Google search results. Lawsuits are slow and expensive, which makes closing the doors in advance more attractive.
2026: closing the remaining doors
This year completes the pattern. Old Reddit required a login, unauthenticated JSON went in May, and now Reddit RSS feeds and the public API follow. A long-time moderator summed it up in the r/redditdev thread: “The shuttering of the public Data API is the final step of a multi-year effort to prevent anyone from accessing” Reddit data without permission.
Who Loses When Reddit RSS Feeds Go Dark
The burden of these changes does not fall evenly. Some groups have a supported route forward; others have none.
| Who | What they lose | Official route forward |
|---|---|---|
| Moderators using feeds for alerts | RSS alerts for their own communities | Discord Relay on Devvit |
| Feed reader users | Subscriptions to subreddits and users | None |
| Bot and app developers | Public Data API access | Port to Devvit; $1,000 bounty if eligible |
| Researchers | Free programmatic access | Commercial or research agreement with Reddit |
| Social listening tools | Public API collection | Commercial data licence |
| AI assistants | Free live access to answer questions | Commercial deal with Reddit |
| Old Reddit users | Access, if inactive there for six months | The current Reddit site |
Moderators
Moderators are volunteers, and many built their workflows on Reddit RSS feeds and long-running bots. The reaction in r/modnews was hostile. One moderator wrote: “You continue to make our work harder and harder.” Another asked: “So uh… what if a mod team doesn’t use Discord? RSS is the only way I find out about posts in subs like this one.” Several warned that the AutoModerator change would mean more outright bans, because filtering a suspect post for review will no longer be possible in new communities.
Bot developers
For developers the problem is the language. Devvit apps are written in TypeScript, while many long-running Reddit bots use Python and the PRAW library. One developer in the r/redditdev thread said they have “300,000 lines of python code” and cannot rewrite it in six months, adding that their bots perform “tens of millions of mod actions”. Another moderator of r/anime said their team had spent five months negotiating a migration and still did not expect it to be finished.
Researchers and social listening tools
Academic researchers and commercial monitoring tools have used the public API to study public conversation on everything from health misinformation to brand sentiment. After March 2027 that work will need a commercial agreement. That raises costs and gives Reddit a say over who can study the platform.
AI assistants
AI assistants that search the web often cite Reddit threads, because they contain practical first-hand answers. Once the public API closes, any assistant that wants that content through official channels needs a deal. That is the commercial heart of the change.
The stakes for assistants are rising as they turn into businesses in their own right, with advertising inside answers now under discussion, as our report on how advertising could influence chatbot answers explains. Human discussion is the raw material that keeps those answers credible, which is why the price of Reddit’s archive keeps going up.
Why scarcity matters to licence holders
A data licence is worth more when the same data cannot be collected for free. While Reddit RSS feeds and the public API stayed open, any company could argue that it did not need a licence for recent posts. Closing both makes the paid route the only clean one, and it strengthens Reddit’s hand when existing deals come up for renewal.
Feed reader users
Ordinary readers lose the most for the least reason. A person who follows five small subreddits in a feed reader is not a large-scale scraper, but Reddit RSS feeds offered no way to tell them apart. When the feeds end, the only supported way to follow those communities is the Reddit app or website itself.
Will Ending Reddit RSS Feeds Actually Stop AI Scrapers?
Closing open endpoints raises the cost of scraping, but it does not end it. The honest answer is that this move mostly shifts scraping from easy, cheap routes to harder, more expensive ones.
What RSS exposed
A feed only ever showed recent items, typically a few dozen posts at a time, with limited metadata. For a scraper, Reddit RSS feeds were attractive because they were free, unauthenticated and easy to poll at scale across thousands of subreddits, not because each feed held much data.
Where scrapers go next
Determined scrapers can still drive a real browser, rotate residential IP addresses and log in with large numbers of accounts. Reddit’s May update to Rule 8, which now covers coordinated account creation, and its lawsuit against scraping firms show it expects exactly that. It is an arms race that favours whoever spends more on detection.
Web scraping and the law
Web scraping occupies a legal grey area in most countries, and outcomes depend on terms of service, how the data was accessed and what it is used for. Reddit’s strategy combines technical barriers with contract terms and lawsuits, which is the same three-part approach large publishers have taken against AI crawlers.
Who still gets in
The likely result is a two-tier Reddit. Companies with a licence, such as Google and OpenAI, keep reliable, structured access. Everyone else either uses the official apps, builds on Devvit within Reddit’s rules, or scrapes against the terms of service. Ending Reddit RSS feeds does not remove Reddit content from AI systems; it decides which AI systems get it legitimately.
The cost to the open web
The trade-off is that every barrier aimed at scrapers also hits legitimate users. RSS was one of the few remaining standards that let people choose how to read the web. Each large site that drops it makes the web a little more dependent on apps controlled by the platforms themselves.
What to Do Before Reddit RSS Feeds Shut Down
The deadlines are short, so the practical steps matter more than the debate.
If you moderate a community
Audit every alert that relies on Reddit RSS feeds and every bot your community depends on. Set up Discord Relay before 13 November if your team uses Discord. If a bot has no known owner, report it through Reddit’s form now; Reddit says it is using those submissions to find owners or replacements.
If you run a bot or app
Register the app before 12 January 2027 at the latest, and before 30 November if you want the $1,000 migration bounty. Read the Data API to Devvit migration guide, list the capabilities you are missing, and tell Reddit through the registration form. Plan for a full rewrite if your code is in Python.
If you read Reddit in a feed reader
There is no supported replacement, so export your subscription list now and decide which communities you will follow in the app instead. Some readers are discussing alternatives such as Lemmy, a federated forum that still publishes open feeds.
If your business monitors Reddit
UK and European firms that track brand mentions or customer complaints on Reddit should ask their social listening provider how it will access Reddit data after March 2027, and whether that will change the price. If you built an in-house tool on the public API, budget for a commercial licence or for losing the data. Treat any vendor that cannot answer clearly as a risk.
Reddit RSS Feeds FAQ
When do Reddit RSS feeds stop working?
On 13 November 2026, according to Reddit’s announcement of 30 September 2026.
Is there a replacement for Reddit RSS feeds?
Only for moderators, who can use the Discord Relay app for alerts about their own communities. Reddit says there is no replacement for anyone else.
When does Reddit’s public API close?
New access requests stop on 31 October 2026. Access starts closing for unregistered apps on 12 January 2027, and all remaining public API access ends in March 2027.
Is Old Reddit shutting down?
Not yet. In the next few months it will be limited to logged-in moderators and users who have used it in the last six months.
Why is Reddit doing this?
Reddit says RSS and its public API have become routes for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. The changes also protect a data licensing business that is growing.
References and Further Reading
Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots (TechCrunch)
Continuing our infrastructure updates: What’s changing in the coming months (r/modnews)
Moving Data API Apps to the Developer Platform: migration dates and next steps (r/redditdev)
Protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse (r/modnews)
Reddit officially admits to prepping the end of RSS feeds (r/rss)
Reddit Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results (Reddit Investor Relations)
Discord Relay app (Reddit Developer Platform)
Reddit is killing RSS feeds on 13 November, blaming AI scraping (The Next Web)
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