Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's clear message to tech giants searching platform: "r/Blocked"

While the platform reportedly gets most of its traffic from search engines, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is clear in its message to tech giants like Microsoft: no more free lunches, pay up if you want Reddit's data. But why the sudden shift? Read on to find out.

What did Reddit CEO Steve Huffman say?

"Any crawler that we don¡¯t have a formal agreement with, we¡¯re now blocking," Huffman said.

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This latest move is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's attempt at ending free data scraping on the popular platform in a bid to control how its data is used. And two successful deals with Google and OpenAI later, Huffman seems doubly sure about his decision. The company has reportedly blocked Microsoft's Bing from accessing any data--comments and posts included--unless there's a deal on the table.

According to CNBCTV18, this move comes hot on the heels of a policy rolled out last month.

"We can no longer be completely open because we have to be very considerate of where our data ends up and what it¡¯s used for. Any crawler that we don¡¯t have a formal agreement with, we¡¯re now blocking," the report quotes Huffman as saying.

Reports confirm that Google is the only search engine at the moment that has any access to content on Reddit. The two signed a $60 million deal earlier this year in February. Reddit¡¯s partnership with Google isn¡¯t exclusive. This means Reddit content can appear in rival search engines, as per what the company shared. Huffman told media that "Over the past two years Google has accounted for as much as 40% to 50% of Reddit¡¯s traffic in a single day."

What policy came into effect recently?

This move comes hot on the heels of a policy rolled out last month | Image: The National

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Only last month, Reddit decided to block people and companies from crawling its platform without authorisation. Those who want in, need to sign agreements with the popular social media platform for content of any kind, including its use in web searches.

The change is only recent because earlier Reddit had a somewhat symbiotic relationship with search engines: they crawled the platform for content and sent people to the platform in return. "When it was used for simple search, to create simple links that would send us traffic from search engines, that was fine,¡± Huffman said. ¡°But now folks are using Reddit data for training, they¡¯re reselling it, they¡¯re doing search summaries instead of linking to us."

The companies left behind right now, including Microsoft and AI companies like Perplexity and Anthropic, couldn't or wouldn't adhere to the content policies and are lagging behind in the race.

Interestingly, Microsoft and OpenAI were already partnered up when OpenAI signed a whopping $203 million deal with Reddit in May. In a sense, Microsoft may already have its foot in the door, but how they play their next move changes everything.

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