--- title: "Reddit is closing its RSS feeds and public API: what changes for a brand that AI describes through Reddit discussions" description: "Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds and moving the apps and bots on its public API onto its own platform. The discussions remain a source for AI, and Reddit machine-translates them: in our monitoring of Italian-language questions, more than half of the citations lead to conversations that started in another country." url: https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/ date: 2026-10-06 modified: 2026-10-15 author: "Pino Barbiera" image: https://www.thinkai.it/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Alleanza-degli-eroi-di-intelligenza-artificiale.jpg categories: ["English"] type: post lang: it --- # Reddit is closing its RSS feeds and public API: what changes for a brand that AI describes through Reddit discussions In brief - Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds on November 13, 2026, and moving the apps and bots on its public API onto its own platform, with registration due by January 12, 2027. The stated reason is large-scale automated harvesting of content. - AI systems use Reddit as a source: Google and OpenAI have been receiving its content since 2024 under direct agreements, which the shutdown does not affect, and licensing is worth $43 million a quarter. - Reddit machine-translates its own discussions to grow abroad. In our monitoring of Italian-language questions, more than half of Reddit citations lead to conversations that started in another country: an Italian brand can end up described by a market that is not its own. When an AI answers a question about a product, part of what it says comes from **Reddit**: discussions among people who bought it, tried it, returned it. Now Reddit has decided to close the two free doors through which anyone could read those discussions with a program, and [it told community moderators so](https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing_our_infrastructure_updates_whats/). The conversations remain a source for AI, but **who can read them in an orderly way**, and on what terms, is changing. For a brand, one thing changes above all: knowing what is being said about it in there gets harder, while AI keeps using it. Index - [What is closing, and when](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#What_is_closing_and_when) - [Why Reddit can afford it](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#Why_Reddit_can_afford_it) - [Reddit translates its discussions, and AI cites the translations](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#Reddit_translates_its_discussions_and_AI_cites_the_translations) - [Who is left out, and who stays in](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#Who_is_left_out_and_who_stays_in) - [What changes for a brand](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#What_changes_for_a_brand) - [Frequently asked questions](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/reddit-closes-rss-api-ai-brands/#Frequently_asked_questions) ## What is closing, and when The first door is **RSS feeds**, the format that lets a program receive a community’s new posts without visiting the site. Reddit is switching them off on November 13, 2026, because, it writes, they have become *“a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.”* For moderators it points to an alternative for alerts from their own communities. For everyone else the line is blunt: anyone using feeds outside a community they moderate **has no replacement**. The second door is the **public API**, the channel through which outside apps and bots read and write on Reddit. Apps and bots must move to Reddit’s developer platform, where they run on the company’s servers, and register by January 12, 2027, to avoid disruption. More than 14,000 already have. The third restriction concerns **Old Reddit**, the old, almost text-only interface: since earlier this year it requires logging in, and in the coming months it will stay open only to people who have used it in the past six months. Reddit explains that, for that interface, unauthenticated access was the largest source of abusive scraping. ## Why Reddit can afford it A site that lives on visits does not usually close its doors. Reddit can do it because its content has become **a scarce commodity**: 26 billion posts and comments written by people, on a web filling up with generated text. In its second-quarter 2026 letter to shareholders, the company cites its own survey of nearly 14,000 Americans who use social media, AI, and online shopping: about half [check AI recommendations on Reddit](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000171344526000098/exhibit992q226.htm) before they buy. It is a self-interested figure, but it says where Reddit sits: next to AI, as the **human cross-check**. That content has a price. In the same quarter Reddit’s “other revenue,” made up almost entirely of content licensing, reached **$43 million**, up 24% from a year earlier, and the company reports [$92 million in multiyear contracts](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000171344526000100/rddt-20260630.htm) already signed. The two public agreements are with **Google**, which in February 2024 gained [access to Reddit’s Data API](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/expanded-reddit-partnership/) to display content and train its models, and with **OpenAI**, which three months later signed [a deal to bring Reddit into ChatGPT](https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/). Closing the free channels protects the value of those agreements. The quarterly report filed with regulators also contains the opposite fear. Among its risks, Reddit lists the models of Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, *“in some cases trained using Reddit content,”* which can answer people instead of a visit to the site. AI is at once Reddit’s **best customer** and its **competitor**: shutting down RSS and the public API is about deciding who stands on which side. ## Reddit translates its discussions, and AI cites the translations For an Italian company the point that matters is a different one, and it is in the same quarterly report. **Reddit** writes that it uses **machine translation** to make its content accessible in several languages, that it counts on this initiative to **grow outside the United States**, where daily users rose 28% in a year, and that it intends to extend it to all major world languages. A discussion born in English thus also exists in Italian, at an address ending in the language code. Reddit admits the risk, too: a search engine may **penalize machine-generated content**. AI cites those translations. In our monitoring of Italian-language questions about cars, motorcycles, and watches, Reddit carries little weight: 0.2% of the sources cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews in a month. But of the 28 citations collected, **13 lead to Italian discussions**, 11 to foreign discussions machine-translated into Italian, and 4 to discussions in English. It is a small sample, from a single month and a single sector. The direction, though, is clear: **more than half the time**, whoever asked the question in Italian gets the opinion of another market, with other models, other prices, and other competitors. ## Who is left out, and who stays in Left out are feed readers, community bots nobody has time to rewrite, and the tools that followed discussions about a brand by reading the feeds or the public API: they will have to go through Reddit’s platform or a contract. Those who already have **an agreement** stay in. Google’s announcement makes one point explicit: the deal does not change how Google uses public pages that its crawlers can read. The discussions will keep reaching AI. What narrows is access for everyone else, including those who only wanted to **keep watch**. It is a trend broader than Reddit. The sites AI reads the most are separating welcome robots from unwanted ones, as the data on [who blocks training crawlers](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/ai-agents-web-traffic-not-human/) show, and turning orderly access to content into **a paid service**. ## What changes for a brand Three practical consequences. First: Reddit remains among the sources AI uses to describe products and companies, and no shutdown changes that in the short term. Second: an Italian brand needs to know **what the discussions in English say** about its category, because they can reach its customers’ answers in translation. Third: control shifts. Following Reddit from the outside gets more expensive, while it remains possible to look at **the AI answers** and the sources they cite, question by question. That is the work that starts with [an AI Brand Audit of the cited sources](https://www.thinkai.it/en/light-audit/): which pages ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity use when they talk about the brand, what language they are in, and whether they are **originals or translations**. From there you can see [why SEO rules alone are no longer enough](https://www.thinkai.it/en/blog/what-is-geo-generative-engine-optimization/) and where it pays to act: on your own site, on reviews, or in the communities where customers actually talk. ## Frequently asked questions **What changes for people who read Reddit?** The site and the app stay as they are. From November 13, 2026, RSS feeds stop working, and for those who used them outside the communities they moderate there is no replacement. The old interface, Old Reddit, will stay accessible only to people who have used it in the past six months. **Will AI stop citing Reddit?** The data do not point that way. Google and OpenAI have been receiving the content since 2024 under direct agreements, which the shutdown of the public API does not affect, and Reddit collects $43 million a quarter from licensing. Google also specifies that it keeps reading public pages with its own crawlers. **How do you check what AI says about a brand when it uses Reddit?** By looking at the sources cited in the answers, question by question: which discussions appear, what language they are in, and whether they are automatic translations of discussions that started in another country. It is a check done on the AI answers themselves, with no need to read Reddit from the outside.