Reddit kills RSS feeds in November and public API by 2027

Reddit will shut down its RSS feeds on November 13 and close public API access by March 2027, citing what it calls "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." The move ends one of the last free, open routes into a corpus of user-generated content that has become a paid product line for the company.

The announcement arrived Wednesday as part of a bundle of updates for moderators and developers. Reddit did not soften the framing: RSS, it said, has become a vehicle for automated abuse at scale. "We know 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," the company wrote in its announcement.

The stakes are straightforward. Reddit's forum archive of conversations has turned into a profitable licensing business as AI developers rush to secure training data. In its second quarter, Reddit reported that its "other revenue" beyond advertising grew 24% year-over-year to $43 million. Giving that data away through RSS or an open API now works against the balance sheet.

Why does the RSS shutdown matter?

RSS — Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary — is a standardized web feed format that lets users and applications pull updates from a website. It flourished in the blogging era, when readers subscribed to new posts through news-reading apps. Google ran the most popular of these readers but shut it down in 2013, ceding the market to Feedly and independent applications.

For Reddit, RSS served two distinct audiences: everyday users who preferred reading Reddit through feed readers, and moderators who wired RSS channels into their own alerting and workflow tools.

Reddit is telling moderators to migrate to the Discord Relay Devvit app and to review their setups before November 13 to avoid disruption. But the company admitted there is no replacement for RSS feeds used outside a moderator's own community.

Moderators have already pushed back. When Reddit earlier signaled it was preparing to end RSS, many complained the platform would become unmanageable for them. Other users stressed that RSS was simply how they read Reddit.

What does the public API shutdown change?

The RSS cutoff is the smaller half of Wednesday's news. Reddit will also end public API access by March 2027.

That deadline affects any tool that used programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including:

• social listening products
• research tools used by academics
• AI products, including AI assistants that currently answer questions using Reddit data

After the closure, those products will need commercial data deals with Reddit or nothing at all. In effect, Reddit converts a previously open research and listening channel into a licensed product.

What is happening to Old Reddit?

Reddit also said it is "adding safeguards" to Old Reddit, its classic, text-heavy interface, changes the company likewise justified by "abusive scraping and automated traffic."

Access will be limited to logged-in moderators and recent users. Over the next few months, Reddit said, logged-in access to Old Reddit will be restricted to people who have used it within the last 90 days.

The company also provided updates on its Rules Hub progress and auto-mod changes as part of the same announcement.

What must developers do before January 2027?

Developers building approved third-party apps and bots must register them with Reddit before January 12, 2027. After that date, Reddit will remove API access for any developer who has not registered.

The sequence now runs: RSS dies November 13, unregistered developers lose access on January 12, 2027, and the public API closes entirely by March 2027. Each step narrows free access to Reddit's data while the licensing business — $43 million and growing 24% a year — expands to fill the gap.