Reddit will end RSS feeds on November 13 and cut off public API access in March 2027, citing scraping by AI bots

Reddit will stop serving RSS feeds on 13 November 2026 and end public API access in March 2027, TechCrunch reports, citing Reddit's own announcement. The company's stated reason is that RSS has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, and that the same pattern shows up in the traffic reaching its public API. The article was published on 30 September 2026 by Sarah Perez.

Reddit's own words, as quoted by TechCrunch, thank the users who relied on RSS over the years and describe the format as a beloved part of the open web. That does not change the outcome. Every public RSS URL that a reader, a Slack channel or an internal tool has been polling stops returning data on the November date, and every public API call that a script has been making stops returning data in March. TechCrunch does not link Reddit's own announcement page in its article; the report is the source that pins the dates.

Two groups of tools have to plan a move

Brand-monitoring and community-tracking teams often subscribe to a subreddit's RSS feed in Feedly, Slack or an internal notifier so a new post about the brand shows up without anyone opening reddit.com. Those feeds stop returning items on 13 November. Six weeks is a short window to find and swap every subscription, so an inventory of which team owns which alert is the first useful step.

Public API access, which today anyone can reach with a free client, ends in March 2027. Reddit already sells paid tiers of the same API, and TechCrunch notes that Reddit's other revenue line, most of it AI licensing, grew 24 percent year over year to 43 million dollars in the second quarter of 2026. Any tool that pulls from a public API endpoint has to move to the paid tier or find another data source before that window closes.

The stated reason is scraping, and the paid tier is the destination

Reddit's argument is that most of the RSS and public-API traffic is not people. It is scrapers pulling the content, some of it into training pipelines and some of it into third-party services. Ending free access is the same move Reddit made against the third-party mobile apps in 2023, and the pattern is now familiar: content that trains or grounds a large model has a price, and platforms whose value is user-written text are the ones charging it.

For a team building software that touches Reddit at all, the question is which one of two paths it belongs on. Read-only monitoring of a subreddit for a brand mention can move to a paid social-listening product that has its own Reddit deal, or to a manual weekly check. Any product that reads Reddit as a live data source needs a budget line for the paid API or a plan to leave. Either move is cheap this week and expensive in November when the RSS URL returns nothing.

Source

• Primary source: Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots, TechCrunch, 30 September 2026, by Sarah Perez