Reddit wants to block search crawlers

Reddit is considering blocking Google and Bing's web crawlers from accessing its content, in an effort to get AI companies to pay for using Reddit data.

Reddit wants generative AI companies like OpenAI to pay for scraping Reddit content to train AI models. If deals aren't reached, Reddit may block search engine crawlers altogether (not just AI crawlers).

What's going on here?

Reddit may block Google and Bing from crawling its content if it can't reach deals with AI companies to pay for scraping Reddit data.

What does this mean?

This would mean Reddit posts and comments would no longer show up in Google or Bing search results. When Reddit communities went private in protest over API changes - many Reddit results in Google just linked to private communities. Blocking crawlers would create a similar effect, making Reddit content unavailable through search engines.

While previous Reddit API pricing changes impacted third-party Reddit apps, the company framed those changes as a way to get AI companies to pay for training data. Blocking crawlers feels like another tactic to achieve that same goal of monetizing Reddit data used for AI training.

Why should I care?

Reddit is one of the most visited websites globally, so no longer having Reddit results in web searches would be a major shift in how folks find information online. You all who use "site:reddit.com", pack up, hacker days might be over.

The question for Reddit is: how much of its traffic comes from search engines and how much do users like using it by directly logging into the app? Beyond traffic sources, no search for Reddit might break the content flywheel of the site.