Reddit will discontinue support for RSS feeds on November 13, 2026, and says there is no replacement for anyone relying on them outside communities they moderate.

New requests for public API access will stop being accepted on October 31, 2026, and all remaining public access closes in March 2027, with developers steered toward Reddit's Developer Platform and a $1 million migration fund. Reddit cites scraping and automated abuse as the driving reasons, and the company has struck AI data deals with Google and OpenAI while suing Anthropic and Perplexity.

Reddit is shutting down two of the main ways outsiders pull data from the site. In an announcement this week, shared on r/modnews and r/redditdev, the company said RSS feeds will stop working on November 13 and that public access to its API closes in March 2027.

"In August, we shared plans to modernize Reddit's infrastructure, build better mod tools, and make it harder for bad actors to scrape Reddit and abuse communities. Today, we have specifics on what's changing, when, and how to plan ahead," Reddit said.

RSS is a simple feed that lets an app automatically check a page for new posts. An API—short for application programming interface—is a front door that lets software request data directly from a service. Together, they have underpinned many third-party tools, bots, and alert systems for years.

The stated reason for the shutdown is scraping—bots that copy huge volumes of content automatically—along with what Reddit calls automated abuse.

Under the new timeline, new requests for public API access end October 31. Apps and users who have not registered or responded to Reddit's outreach will begin losing access on January 12, 2027, and everyone remaining is cut off in March.

Reddit wants developers to rebuild on its Developer Platform, known as Devvit, and is offering a $1 million App Migration Program. The fund includes $1,000 payments for eligible apps that move over, plus free hosting, with applications due November 30. More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far, and Reddit says popular tools such as DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot, and RemindMeBot have finished or nearly finished migrating.

For moderators who receive alerts through RSS, Reddit points to a Devvit app called Discord Relay. For RSS use outside a community one moderates, "there is no replacement," the says.

Old Reddit, the older version of the site favored by many longtime users, is next. In the coming months it will be limited to logged-in users who used it within the last six months, while moderators retain access regardless.

Data and money

For users trying to understand the rationale, it can be summed up in two words: data and money.

Reddit holds years of real people answering real questions—which phone to buy, how to fix a leaking pipe, whether a symptom warrants a doctor visit.

Back in 2023, Reddit began charging developers for API access, and thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. The company then signed a roughly $60 million-per-year licensing agreement with Google in early 2024, allowing the search giant to train AI models on Reddit posts—feeding them text so they learn to write and answer questions. A deal with OpenAI followed that May.

Those that did not sign formal agreements ended up in court. Reddit sued Anthropic, the company behind Claude, in June 2025, alleging its bots hit Reddit servers more than 100,000 times after it said it had stopped. In October 2025 it went after Perplexity and three data-scraping firms, accusing them of getting around its protections. Perplexity and SerpApi have pushed back on the claims.

Scrapers have also learned to hide. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, accused Perplexity in August 2025 of disguising its crawlers as ordinary Chrome browsers to get past blocks. Perplexity disputes the claim.

Reddit says logged-out access was the biggest source of abusive scraping on Old Reddit. A bot that looks like a person is hard to stop at the door, which is why the login requirement came first.

For regular users, the practical risk is losing the small tools that make Reddit usable: reminder bots, moderator helpers, and alert feeds. If an app's maker does not migrate, it goes dark. The key dates from here: migration-fund applications close on November 30, 2026, existing unregistered apps begin losing access on January 12, 2027, and the remaining public access shuts off in March 2027—after the RSS shutdown takes effect on November 13, 2026.