Reddit Kills RSS on Nov. 13. Here’s What Breaks and What to Do

If you follow a subreddit by appending .rss to its address, you have until Nov. 13. That is the date Reddit stops supporting RSS feeds, according to an update the company posted to r/modnews on Sept. 30 and first reported by TechCrunch. The feeds go first. The public Data API follows in March 2027.

Reddit’s stated reason is bots. RSS, the company wrote, is now “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” and it says it will keep moderation workflows that depend on feeds running through “supported alternatives.” For everyone else, Reddit was blunt: “If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement.”

The timeline, in order

• Oct. 31, 2026: Reddit stops taking new requests for public API access, per WinBuzzer’s read of the developer posts.
• Nov. 13, 2026: RSS feeds stop working.
• Jan. 12, 2027: Approved third-party apps and bots must be registered with Reddit or lose API access.
• March 2027: The public API closes. Anyone who wants Reddit data after that, AI assistants included, has to negotiate a commercial deal or build on Reddit’s own Developer Platform.

Old Reddit, the text-heavy classic interface beloved by power users and scrapers alike, is also being fenced off. Reddit says access will be limited to logged-in moderators and people who have used it recently, citing “abusive scraping and automated traffic.” Outlets have reported different cutoffs for “recently” (TechCrunch says 90 days; Android Headlines says six months), so treat the exact window as unsettled until Reddit’s own help pages say otherwise.

Scraping is the reason given. Licensing is the business.

Scraping is a real problem for every large site. But follow the money. In its second-quarter results, Reddit reported US$43 million (CA$60 million) in “other revenue,” the non-advertising line, up 24% year over year. TechCrunch attributes that line largely to AI licensing. Reddit’s IPO filing showed it had already signed US$203 million in data-licensing contracts by early 2024, and OpenAI’s 2024 partnership gave it access to “Reddit’s Data API, which provides real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit.”

Our read: shutting the free doors is how you raise the price on the paid one. An RSS feed is an unmetered copy of the site’s newest posts, and Reddit’s most valuable product to AI buyers is exactly that, fresh human conversation. Closing feeds and the open API turns a leak into an inventory. The scraping argument and the licensing argument aren’t in conflict. They point the same way.

The forty-three million is small next to Reddit’s US$762 million in quarterly ad revenue. Our bet is that it is also the part that grows only as long as the data stays scarce.

Who loses

Moderators who pipe new posts, reports or mod-log entries into Slack or Discord through a feed. Reddit points them to Discord Relay, a Developer Platform app that sends community alerts to Discord or Slack channels.

Researchers and social-listening tools that read Reddit through the public API. Reddit’s answer for academics is its Reddit for Researchers program, which WinBuzzer reports offers approved noncommercial projects free access to a historical dataset via BigQuery, with a six-month delay. That is fine for a dissertation. It is useless for anyone tracking a story in real time.

Volunteer tool builders. Reddit is offering a migration bounty, US$1,000 (CA$1,390) per app moved to its Developer Platform, from a US$1 million pool, according to WinBuzzer, with applications closing Nov. 30. One r/science moderator, quoted by WinBuzzer, said Reddit had reached out about migrating but that the mod team lacked “the time or energy,” and expected their tools to break in March.

Ordinary readers who built a calm, algorithm-free Reddit inside Feedly, Inoreader or NetNewsWire. Nobody is building anything for them.

What to do before Nov. 13

1. Audit your feed reader. Search your subscriptions for “reddit.com.” Anything you can’t live without, follow inside Reddit’s app instead, and decide which communities deserve push notifications.
2. Moderators: install Discord Relay now, while your RSS alerts still work as a fallback, and check that reports and mod-log events arrive where your team expects them.
3. Developers: register your app before Jan. 12 and decide whether to port to the Developer Platform. If you want the bounty, the application window closes Nov. 30.
4. Researchers: apply to Reddit for Researchers early, and budget for a six-month lag in your methods section.
5. Keep a copy of your own history. Request your data at reddit.com/settings/data-request. Reddit’s help page says it can take “up to 30 days” to prepare, so ask now if you want it before the March changes.

RSS will outlive this. It has outlived Google Reader. What it won’t do, after Nov. 13, is show you a single new Reddit post.

Sources

• TechCrunch: Reddit is killing RSS feeds, ending public API access because of AI bots
• Reddit r/modnews: Continuing our infrastructure updates
• Social Media Today: Reddit ends support for RSS feeds
• WinBuzzer: Reddit to end feed-reader updates and public API access for apps
• Android Headlines: Reddit is ending RSS feeds amid scraping concerns
• GIGAZINE: Reddit will discontinue RSS feeds and terminate public API access
• Business Wire: Reddit Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results
• TechCrunch: Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data
• OpenAI: OpenAI and Reddit partnership
• Reddit Help: How do I request a copy of my Reddit data and information?