Google just gained exclusive access to Reddit

Reddit has begun blocking all search engines except those that pay to crawl its site — namely, Google. A report from 404 Media says that search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo don’t show any results from the last week, even when using the “site:reddit.com” search query. Because Google has paid the bill upfront, niche search engines like Kagi that rely on Google still have access to Reddit.

In the case of DuckDuckGo, the report claims that Reddit has blocked the search engine from pulling any data, stating, “We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.”

It’s fascinating to see how much sway Reddit now has, even over a company as big as Google. Just last October, Reddit reportedly threatened to block Google too if it didn’t agree to its new API pricing, an increase that resulted in the death of some popular third-party apps and a blackout across many prominent subreddits last summer.

This culminated with Reddit going public in March 2024. It has since been on a mission to monetize its forums to great effect, primarily through data licensing. Just a couple of months later, Reddit and OpenAI would announce that ChatGPT would be trained on Reddit’s data API.

We’ve also seen Google begin to favor Reddit in its search results over the past six months, which was announced in February, facilitating “more content-forward displays of Reddit information.”

This went on to be integrated into AI Overviews to produce some embarrassing results, including surfacing a joke from Reddit about cooking pizza with glue.