Reddit is one of the most-cited sources across ChatGPT and Google’s AI, which raises an obvious objection: Reddit famously locked down its API in 2023, so how are the assistants leaning on it? Here is the answer.
But wait, isn’t Reddit locked down? How can an AI read it if the API is paywalled?
This is the objection everyone raises, and it is a fair one, because Reddit is one of the most-cited sources across all these engines. Reddit famously shut its doors in 2023, so how are the assistants leaning on it? The short answer: the lockdown was aimed at free scrapers and third-party apps, not at partners who pay.
- What Reddit locked was the free API. In 2023 it started charging steeply for its data API, which killed off third-party apps like Apollo and free bulk scraping. That is the “Reddit is locked” everyone remembers, and it is real.
- But it never stopped licensing the data to those who pay. Reddit turned its content into a product and sold it. Google signed a data deal reported at around $60 million a year in early 2024, and OpenAI signed its own partnership with Reddit in May 2024.
- So the assistants reach Reddit through those deals, not by scraping. The paywall is the point: it stopped the free-for-all precisely so Reddit could charge the AI companies for the same data. Google’s deal is exactly why Reddit shows up so heavily in Google’s AI answers, and OpenAI’s is why it shows up in ChatGPT.
- And a public Reddit thread is still just a web page. Any thread you can open without logging in is public. The API lock controls programmatic bulk access, not whether a permitted reader can load one page. “You cannot hit the API for free” and “nobody can read Reddit” are two very different claims.
The upshot for you: you can no longer pull Reddit data freely, but what you post in a public subreddit is exactly what these licensed pipelines feed to the assistants. Being genuinely present on Reddit still reaches the models, you just cannot vacuum the data back out the way people used to.