Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has stated that Microsoft and other companies need to pay for accessing Reddit's data, following agreements made with Google and OpenAI. Huffman criticized Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for scraping Reddit's data without permission, describing the situation as challenging for Reddit. He noted that the platform has updated its robots.txt file to block web crawlers lacking agreements, leading to Reddit results being visible only on Google, where Reddit is compensated. Huffman accused Microsoft of using Reddit's data to train its AI and summarizing content in Bing results without consent, while also selling this data through the Bing API. In response to Reddit's results disappearing from Bing, Microsoft claimed it respects website directives regarding content usage. Huffman emphasized that the traditional value exchange between search engines and content providers is changing, as the lines between search, summarization, and training blur. He pointed to OpenAI's SearchGPT, which includes Reddit results due to a licensing deal, as a model for future agreements. Huffman’s comments align with a broader trend among media publishers seeking compensation for their content used in generative AI. Spokespeople for Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity did not provide comments on the matter by the time of publication.