- Reddit will fully shut down all RSS feeds on November 13, citing scraping abuse.
- Bots and AI agents now generate 57% of all global web traffic, fresh data shows.
- Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai shares are sharply climbing as bot traffic grows.
Reddit is pulling the plug on RSS feeds this November, and the reason it gives, stopping scrapers and bad bots, says less about Reddit and more about where the entire internet is headed. Across the web, automated traffic has quietly overtaken human visitors, and platforms are rewriting their rules to match.
Reddit’s Shutdown, Piece By Piece
Starting November 13, RSS feeds on Reddit stop working completely. There is no built-in replacement for people who relied on RSS to follow subreddits they don’t moderate. For mods, Reddit is pointing people toward newer tools instead:
- RSS-based mod alerts should move to Devvit apps like Discord Relay before the cutoff
- Public API apps and bots, over 14,000 have registered so far, must migrate to Reddit’s Developer Platform by January 12, 2027
- Old Reddit access is tightening further: logged-in users who haven’t visited in the last six months will lose access, though moderators are exempt
- Automod’s enforcement tools (Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as Spam, Approve) will be switched off by default for new and inactive communities, pushing them toward Rules Hub and Automations instead
That last change in particular has drawn backlash in Reddit’s own comment section, with moderators arguing the newer tools can’t match automod’s flexibility for filtering spam and bad actors.
Why Every Platform Is Suddenly Doing This
Reddit isn’t acting alone. Cloudflare data shows bots and AI agents now account for roughly 57% of all web requests, a threshold Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince thought wouldn’t arrive until the end of 2027. It hit in May instead. Prince now expects automated traffic to run as much as a thousand times ahead of human traffic within five years.
That single statistic explains a lot of recent platform behavior: fewer open, easily-scraped feeds, more gated APIs, more logins required just to view a page. The open web, built on the assumption that most traffic came from people, is being redesigned around machines instead.
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Someone Is Making Money Off This Shift
While platforms lock things down, the companies that move internet traffic for a living are having a very good year:
- Cloudflare’s stock has climbed 121% from its February low
- Fastly is up 159% so far this year
- Akamai has gained 51% since its November low
These firms run the content delivery networks that carry and secure web traffic, and more bot requests mean more demand for their capacity. Akamai got an unexpected boost in September when Anthropic signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year deal covering CPU workloads, along with a warrant to buy roughly 5% of Akamai’s shares.
The stock jumped 16% the next day before giving most of it back, and Akamai said the deal changes nothing about its 2026 revenue outlook, even as it plans to spend $1.7 billion more this year on hardware.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer has flagged a strange gap in how investors are pricing all this: Akamai trades under 16 times this year’s earnings, while Cloudflare sits at 279 times and Fastly above 50.
His read is that Akamai is still digesting a year of heavy spending while Cloudflare’s revenue growth has been accelerating.
The Real Fight: Who Pays For The Bots
Cloudflare, for its part, wants AI companies to pay for what their crawlers take. In September, it rolled out a setting letting websites block AI training crawlers while still showing up in search results, a split that previously wasn’t possible. Apple and Google already respect it. Microsoft says it will by early 2027.
How that fight plays out may decide the next phase of the internet. If AI firms start paying for access, the open web survives in some form. If they don’t, platforms like Reddit will likely keep doing exactly what they’re doing now: closing the doors and hoping the bots stop knocking.
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