Reddit no longer simply feeds its content to search engines. Google is the only one that can still show recent posts because it paid a lot for it.

Search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives no longer show recent posts from Reddit, 404Media notes. If you want to know what is being said about a specific topic on Reddit, you can go ahead Website:reddit.com Adding it to search will filter the results, but if you don’t use Google, you’ll no longer see recent user posts.

This is no coincidence. Reddit signed a $60 million per year deal with Google in February. The deal gives Google access to the content on Reddit to train its Gemini models, but also to index recent posts in the search engine. Reddit is fed up with search engines gobbling up its content without paying a fair price for it.

Pay or out

Search engines use “web crawlers” to collect and index web content. Reddit announced it would take action and is following through on its word. Changes were made to the robot.txt file to deny web crawlers access to non-paying parties. “It is a signal to those who do not have an agreement with us that they should not have access to Reddit data,” the company told The Verge.

Steve Huffman goes a step further and names some companies by name. According to the CEO, Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity are constantly trying to bring content onto the platform without an agreement. “These companies believe that everything on the Internet is free for them. Without an agreement, we have no control over how our data is used.” Other companies have also complained about the “aggressive tactics” that Anthropic uses to obtain data.

Microsoft sees things differently and believes that Reddit gives “other search engines” an unfair advantage by not allowing their web crawlers. Reddit responds that Google will not get exclusivity. It is open to negotiations with all search engine owners, but no other agreement has been reached for now “as some cannot or do not want to make enforceable commitments regarding their use of Reddit content, including its use for AI,” a spokesperson told Rand. So the doors will remain closed until a bag of money is put on the table.

Front page of the Internet

Reddit is one of the largest online discussion forums. The site is divided into thousands Subreddit around a specific topic and is therefore sometimes referred to as “the front page of the Internet”. With 57 million daily and 512 million monthly active users, it has significantly fewer users than Facebook, for example, but the quality of the discussions is usually much higher.

In times when AI-generated content is making it into the top search engine results, it is even more important to verify its origin. Reddit is thus becoming a source of information, because the content is still created for and by people. The company itself recognizes the value of its data sets and no longer gives them away for free.

This article originally appeared on July 25. The text has been updated with the latest information.