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.
How AI reads Reddit even though 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.
Use Camera to Clipboard to collect AI answer screenshots
Reddit threads reach the assistants through licensing deals, so the only way to find out whether your own posts are being quoted is to go and read the answers. Most people meet those answers on a phone, screenshot the ones that cite them, and then the picture sits in a camera roll where the document they keep notes in cannot reach it. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, sends a picture from the phone straight onto the computer clipboard.
- A screenshot already sitting in the phone’s library can be sent to the computer several at a time. There is no emailing it to yourself, no cable and no upload to somebody else’s website in between. The phone and the computer find each other over your own local network and send the picture directly.
- Google pays a reported $60 million a year for Reddit’s data and OpenAI signed its own deal in May 2024, so one thread of yours can be quoted by two different assistants on two different days. Neither company publishes which thread it drew on, so a dated screenshot of the answer is the only record you will ever have that it cited you.
- A picture from Camera to Clipboard arrives as an ordinary clipboard image, so Word and Google Docs take it inline and Photoshop or GIMP open it as a new layer. Anything that accepts a pasted picture accepts this one, which means the record can live wherever you already keep notes rather than in a folder of its own.
Conclusion: how AI still reads Reddit after the 2023 lockdown
- Reddit’s 2023 lockdown closed the free data API and killed third-party apps like Apollo, and it never stopped Reddit selling the same content to companies that pay. Any thread you can open without logging in is still an ordinary public web page, so “you cannot hit the API for free” and “nobody can read Reddit” are two very different claims.
- Google signed a Reddit data deal reported at around $60 million a year in early 2024, and OpenAI signed its own partnership in May 2024. Those two deals are why Reddit turns up so heavily in Google’s AI answers and in ChatGPT, and neither company publishes which thread an answer drew on.
- Post genuinely in public subreddits, because what you write there is exactly what those paid data deals hand to the assistants. What you cannot do any more is download Reddit data in bulk for free, so plan on being present on Reddit rather than on measuring Reddit from the outside.