Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13 and close its public API by March 2027, the company announced Wednesday, September 30, according to a TechCrunch report by Sarah Perez. Free, programmatic reading of Reddit conversations is ending on a fixed schedule. Any workflow that depends on it now has a deadline.

Reddit’s stated reason is abuse. The company describes RSS as a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” In its announcement, Reddit also said: “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 tone is regretful. The decision is final.

TechCrunch adds a commercial backdrop that Reddit did not offer as its reason. Licensing its forum content to AI companies has turned into a lucrative sideline, the outlet notes, and Reddit’s second-quarter “other revenue” outside advertising rose 24 percent from a year earlier, reaching $43 million. Perez concluded that Reddit has little reason to hand that data out at no charge. That is the reporter’s inference. Reddit’s own wording points to scraping and automated traffic.

The API closure carries the larger consequence for search teams. TechCrunch reports that the shutdown hits tools that pull Reddit discussions through code, among them social listening products, research tools, and AI assistants. Today an assistant can draw on Reddit when answering a user’s question. Once public access closes, the outlet says, such products must strike paid agreements with Reddit to keep the data.

Three dates define the timeline:

Reddit is also tightening Old Reddit, its older text-focused interface. The company said it is “adding safeguards,” and access will narrow to signed-in moderators and recently active users, a change Reddit tied to “abusive scraping and automated traffic.” Over the coming months, signed-in users who have not touched Old Reddit within six months will lose access. Reddit had initially set the window at 90 days, TechCrunch notes, and extended it to six months as the news went out.

Moderators absorb the most immediate disruption. Reddit recommends the Discord Relay Devvit app for moderators who use RSS channels for alerts, and it urged moderators and their teams to migrate workflows before November 13. For feeds used outside a moderators’ own community, Reddit said no replacement exists. Moderators had already voiced worry when Reddit hinted earlier at ending RSS, per TechCrunch.

The announcement leaves several questions open for practitioners. Reddit has not published pricing or eligibility terms in the material TechCrunch describes, and the report does not say which vendors already hold commercial agreements. Without those details, nobody can yet judge whether a tool that reads Reddit today will keep working after March 2027, or at what cost to its customers.

For SEO and brand teams, the practical effect is on monitoring. Brand-mention alerts built on RSS will stop on November 13, and dashboards fed by the public API have until March 2027 at most. Reddit discussion still shapes what AI assistants say about products and companies, so losing visibility into it is a measurement gap, not a minor inconvenience.

Teams should inventory every report, alert, and vendor tool that touches Reddit data this month. Then ask each vendor in writing whether it has a commercial arrangement with Reddit, so you know before March 2027 which Reddit signals you can still measure.

This article is based on reporting by Sarah Perez of TechCrunch, published September 30, 2026, covering announcements from Reddit.