Reddit cut RSS after AI licensing grew to $43 million a quarter

The free data under your product just got a fence around it. If your team ships AI features that lean on public web content, the supply side is changing fast. Reddit is shutting doors. Google is testing checks to publishers. Magazine executives are in Washington. Let me catch you up.

The deep cut

• Open data is becoming a contract. Reddit kept RSS and APIs free until AI licensing turned its forum talk into a $43 million business.
• A login wall is a scraping wall. Reddit now gates Old Reddit behind recent use, with mods the only exemption.
• An expectation is not an agreement. Judge Mehta dismissed Chegg and Penske because free traffic was never a promise.

The doors Reddit is bolting shut

Reddit set hard dates. RSS feeds end November 13th. Public API access winds down through March 2027, with access removal starting January 12th. If your tools pull Reddit data through either, they break on those days. The company told moderators to move alerts to its Discord Relay app, but was blunt about the rest: "If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement."

Why now? Reddit says RSS became "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." The real tell is in the money. TechCrunch reported that Reddit's "other revenue" beyond ads, mostly AI licensing, grew 24% to $43 million in one quarter. Reddit is not closing to AI. It is closing to AI that does not pay.

When "logged in" is not enough

The quieter squeeze is on Old Reddit, the classic text version many power users prefer. Reddit will soon block it for anyone who has not used it in the last six months. A login requirement came first. This closes what Reddit calls the gap: bots using logged-in accounts with no real history.

The only group exempt is moderators. Lifehacker's workaround is to spin up your own subreddit so you count as a mod. That tells you something. The platform is treating access itself as a permission to grant, not a default. If your research or listening tools scrape through a browser session, assume that path narrows too.

The courts just told publishers to go home

Publishers tried the legal route and lost. A federal judge dismissed antitrust suits from Chegg and Rolling Stone's parent Penske Media, both of whom argued Google coerced them into feeding AI Overviews for free or vanishing from search. Judge Mehta sided with Google, writing that plaintiffs pleaded only an "expectation" of traffic. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

That line matters for your roadmap. The old handshake, publish freely and Google sends readers, was never a contract. Mehta said antitrust law cannot fix the economics; that is a job for Congress. So publishers are now fighting on two fronts at once, and one just closed.

Buying instead of taking

With courts cool and tools cut off, the market is sorting into deals. Google is testing payouts to about 100 publishers for content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. One early publisher earned over $1 million in a year; a newer one made $50,000 to $60,000. Meanwhile Condé Nast, the AP, The Atlantic, Meta, and Amazon have all signed licensing contracts.

The holdouts are lobbying. Executives from Vogue, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan are backing the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would force AI scrapers to identify themselves or face FTC penalties. And there is a floor under all this: Google buried Brown Brothers Media's AI content farms after a Futurism investigation, wiping sites like VegOut from search. Cheap scraped content is not a durable supply.

Three questions for your team

• Which of our AI features depend on Reddit RSS or the public API, and what breaks on November 13th and in March 2027?
• Do we have licensing deals or just an "expectation" of access, and which sources could cut us off with a login wall tomorrow?
• If free scraped data gets fenced off or litigated, what is our budget line for paid data, and who owns that decision?