What Reddit announced on 30 September
Reddit made two announcements on 30 September 2026, one to moderators in r/modnews and one to developers in r/redditdev. Both are framed as protection against scraping. The moderator post says that “because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026”. Moderators who use RSS for alerts are told to move to a Developer Platform app called Discord Relay. Everyone else gets one sentence: “If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement.”
The developer post sets dates for the public data API. New requests for public API access stop on 31 October 2026. Registration for a migration bounty, worth $1,000 to eligible apps that move, closes on 30 November. From 12 January 2027, Reddit will “begin removing API access for apps and users that haven't registered or engaged with us”, and “remaining public API access will end in March 2027”. Reddit says more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered.
The same moderator post tightens Old Reddit, the text-heavy older interface, further: in the coming months only logged-in users who have used it in the last six months, and moderators, will keep access. TechCrunch, which first reported the changes, noted that public API closure affects “social listening products, those used by researchers, and AI products”, and that AI assistants would need commercial deals with Reddit for its data. We read that point through TechCrunch; the developer post does not mention AI assistants by name.
Three closures in four months
The RSS decision finishes a sequence that Reddit has announced in public, in its own words, since May.
Announcement date and what it closes, from Reddit's own posts
Source: Reddit, r/modnews posts of 28 May, 30 June and 30 September 2026, and r/redditdev post of 30 September 2026, read 1 October 2026.
Bars show sequence only, not magnitude. “Closed” steps were confirmed by our own requests on 1 October 2026; the rest are dates Reddit has announced.
The 28 May post, “Protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse”, announced that Reddit would be “shutting down unauthenticated .json endpoints”, which “can be used to scrape Reddit without accountability”. It also flagged RSS: “another common surface for scraping is RSS”, and asked moderators how they used it. The 30 June post said Old Reddit's logged-out experience was “a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic” and that everyone would have to log in to use it, while “this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com”.
Read together, the direction is plain. A person in a browser can still read Reddit without an account. A program that wants Reddit's content in a structured form will, after March 2027, need either Reddit's Developer Platform, which is built for apps running inside Reddit communities, or a commercial agreement. Reddit's data licensing is a business: TechCrunch reports its “other revenue” outside advertising grew 24 per cent year on year to $43 million in its second quarter. We did not read Reddit's filing and cite the figure as TechCrunch gives it.
What a script can read today
Announcements describe intentions. To see what actually works now, we made logged-out requests on 1 October 2026 to every route a simple monitoring script might use, from one connection, with an ordinary desktop browser user-agent and no account.
What each route returned to an unauthenticated script
Source: Media Morpheus Research, unauthenticated requests with curl and a standard desktop browser user-agent string, 1 October 2026, 15:10 to 15:30 UTC.
Full bar means the route returned Reddit content; a minimal bar means it did not. The www.reddit.com result is what a script receives; a person in a browser that runs the challenge still sees the page. A seventh request, to oauth.reddit.com without a token, also returned 403, as an authenticated endpoint should, and is not counted as a route.
RSS was the only route that returned content, and every RSS feed type we tried worked. A keyword search across all of Reddit (search.rss?q=…&sort=new) returned 25 posts. So did the newest posts in r/PublicRelations, the newest comments in r/PublicRelations, a user's activity, and every post linking to a given news domain. The comment feed for Reddit's own 30 September announcement returned 201 entries, the post and 200 comments. Subreddit feeds also carry the full text of each post, which is how we read Reddit's announcements.
The feeds are rate-limited hard. Our first run, six RSS requests three seconds apart, received HTTP 429 for every one, and a later single request to the r/redditdev feed also got 429 before succeeding two minutes later. With a minute between requests, all six succeeded first time. A monitoring script polling several brand names would have to be patient; a hosted tool polling thousands of names from one address would not get far.
The domain feed deserves a note for anyone in placement work. reddit.com/domain/<site>/.rss lists every Reddit post linking to a given website. It is the simplest way to see whether a piece of coverage was shared on Reddit, and it is one of the feeds that ends on 13 November.
What this means for brand monitoring
Reddit matters to a company's reputation for two reasons, both covered elsewhere in our research. Threads rank in Google for product and company searches, and they are among the sources AI assistants draw on, which is set out in do Reddit threads show up in AI answers. A thread that turns against a company can therefore reach customers through two channels that the company does not control. Knowing about it early is the whole point of monitoring.
The cheapest way to know has been a keyword RSS feed: a search for the company's name, sorted by newest, piped into an email digest, a Slack channel or a feed reader. That is precisely what Reddit has said has no replacement. After 13 November a company has three options, none free of trade-offs:
Check by hand. A logged-in person can still search Reddit, sort by new and look. That works for a small company with one name to watch, and fails the moment the name is common or the person is on holiday.
Use a vendor with a data arrangement. Commercial social listening tools will keep Reddit coverage only if they have, or reach, an agreement with Reddit. We have not verified which do, and the announcements do not list them. Anyone buying a monitoring tool on the strength of Reddit coverage should ask the vendor directly how it accesses Reddit after March 2027, and get the answer in writing.
Watch Reddit through search engines. Threads that rank in Google or Bing can be found there, and alerts on a company name will catch some of them. This catches only what a search engine has indexed and chosen to show, and only after it has done so, which for a fast-moving thread is too late to matter.
For the wider job of watching what search and AI say about a company, see ongoing monitoring. For the separate question of whether a company can or should take part in Reddit threads, Reddit's own rules are set out in the Reddit guide above; nothing in this change makes participation easier.
Why Reddit is doing this
Reddit's stated reason is abuse: scraping, spam networks and what its May post calls “agentic account creation”. The commercial context is that Reddit licenses its content to AI companies, and a site that sells access has little reason to leave free side doors open. Both can be true at once. The public posts give only the first reason; the second is TechCrunch's reading, and it is consistent with the dates.
For companies, the effect is the same either way. Reddit is moving from a place anyone could read by machine to one that can be read freely only by eye. That mirrors a wider pattern in which publishers and platforms close the open routes AI crawlers used, documented in do news sites block AI crawlers and what is Common Crawl. It is a reminder that monitoring built on free, unofficial access to someone else's platform lasts only as long as that platform tolerates it.
Methodology and limitations
Reddit's announcements were read in full from Reddit's own RSS feeds for r/modnews and r/redditdev, which carry the complete text of each post, on 1 October 2026: the r/modnews posts of 28 May, 30 June and 30 September 2026 and the r/redditdev post of 30 September 2026. TechCrunch's report of 30 September was read directly. The access test was run on 1 October 2026 between 15:10 and 15:30 UTC from a single connection with curl, no cookies, no account and a standard desktop Chrome user-agent string. We requested two .json URLs (a subreddit listing and a site-wide search), api.reddit.com, oauth.reddit.com without a token, an Old Reddit subreddit page and a www.reddit.com subreddit page and search page, recording the HTTP status and what the body contained. We then requested six RSS feeds — a site-wide keyword search sorted by new, a subreddit's new posts, a subreddit's comments, a user, a domain and a single thread's comments — first three seconds apart and then, for the six listed, sixty seconds apart, counting the entries returned. The first run used a subreddit's default listing in place of the thread feed. Five limitations apply. First, this is one connection on one day; Reddit's rate limits and blocks may treat other addresses, including data-centre addresses used by hosted tools, differently. Second, a browser that runs Reddit's JavaScript challenge can still read the main site logged out, so “a script cannot read it” is not “a person cannot read it”. Third, we did not test authenticated or Developer Platform access, which is the route Reddit intends developers to use. Fourth, we did not ask any monitoring vendor how it accesses Reddit and make no claim about any of them. Fifth, Reddit's dates are its own and may move; the RSS date is stated precisely, the API end only as “March 2027”.
Conclusion
Reddit has now said, in its own posts, when each remaining logged-out route for machines will close. Unauthenticated JSON is gone, Old Reddit needs a login, RSS ends on 13 November 2026 and the public API in March 2027. Our test on 1 October confirms the first two and shows RSS still working, keyword search included, as long as requests are spaced out. For the next six weeks a company can still be alerted automatically when its name appears on Reddit at no cost. After that, the options are a person searching by hand, a vendor that has a data arrangement with Reddit, or search-engine alerts that see only what has been indexed. Given that Reddit threads feed both Google results and AI answers, a company that relies on Reddit monitoring should decide which of those it will use before November, and ask any vendor it pays exactly how it reaches Reddit after March.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does Reddit stop serving RSS feeds?
On 13 November 2026. Reddit announced on 30 September that it will “stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026” because RSS has become “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse”. Moderators are offered a Discord relay app; for other uses, Reddit says “there is no replacement”.
When does Reddit's public API close?
In stages. New requests for public API access stop on 31 October 2026, access starts to be removed on 12 January 2027 for apps that have not registered, and remaining public access ends in March 2027. Developers are directed to Reddit's Developer Platform.
Can you still monitor Reddit for your company name today?
Yes, by RSS. On 1 October 2026 a logged-out keyword search feed returned 25 matching posts, as did feeds for a subreddit, its comments, a user, a news domain and a thread, provided requests were spaced about a minute apart. Requests three seconds apart were refused with HTTP 429.
What other logged-out routes have already closed?
When we tested on 1 October 2026, Reddit's .json endpoints and api.reddit.com returned HTTP 403, Old Reddit returned a login page, and the main site returned a JavaScript challenge to a script. Unauthenticated JSON was withdrawn after a 28 May announcement and Old Reddit login began after 30 June.
How can a company watch Reddit after 13 November?
By searching by hand while logged in, through a monitoring vendor that has its own arrangement with Reddit, or through search-engine alerts that catch threads once they are indexed. Reddit's announcement names no supported replacement for keyword RSS outside moderation, so buyers should ask vendors how they will access Reddit after March 2027.
Why is Reddit closing these routes?
Reddit says it is fighting scraping, spam and automated abuse. TechCrunch also links the change to Reddit's AI data licensing, reporting that AI products using Reddit will need commercial deals after the public API closes. Reddit's own posts give only the abuse rationale.
Sources
- platform announcement Reddit, r/modnews, Continuing our infrastructure updates: What's changing in the coming months, 30 September 2026. RSS ends 13 November 2026; “there is no replacement” outside moderation; Old Reddit limited to recent users. Read in full via the r/modnews RSS feed, 1 October 2026.
- platform announcement Reddit, r/redditdev, Moving Data API Apps to the Developer Platform: migration dates and next steps, 30 September 2026. API dates from 31 October 2026 to March 2027; 14,000 registered apps; $1M migration programme. Read in full via the r/redditdev RSS feed, 1 October 2026.
- platform announcement Reddit, r/modnews, Protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse, 28 May 2026, and Logging in to use Old Reddit, 30 June 2026. Withdrawal of unauthenticated .json; Old Reddit login requirement. Read via RSS, 1 October 2026.
- trade press TechCrunch, Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots, 30 September 2026. Effect on social listening and AI products; Reddit's second-quarter “other revenue” of $43 million. Read 1 October 2026.
- live read Media Morpheus Research, logged-out requests to Reddit RSS feeds, .json endpoints, api.reddit.com, oauth.reddit.com, old.reddit.com and www.reddit.com, 1 October 2026, 15:10 to 15:30 UTC. Status codes and entry counts as reported above.