Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay
Illustration: The Verge
Reddit is ramping up its crackdown on web crawlers. Over the past few weeks, Reddit has started blocking search engines from surfacing recent posts and comments unless the search engine pays up, according to a report from 404 Media.
Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — and that’s likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit.
It’s a bold move for a massive website like Reddit to block some of the most popular search engines, but it’s not all that surprising. Over the past year,…