Reddit CEO: 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 issues with unauthorized scraping. In a recent interview, Huffman criticized Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for using Reddit's content without permission, describing the situation as challenging for Reddit to manage. He noted that Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block web crawlers that do not have agreements in place, leading to Reddit results being visible only on Google, where Reddit has a paid arrangement. Huffman accused Microsoft of using Reddit's data to train its AI and summarize content in Bing search results without informing Reddit, and he expressed concern over the sale of Reddit data through the Bing API to other search engines. He emphasized that the traditional value exchange between search engines and content providers is changing, as the lines between search, summarization, and training are becoming blurred. In response to Reddit's actions, Microsoft stated that it respects website directives regarding content usage. Huffman pointed to a recent partnership with OpenAI as a model for future agreements, indicating that Reddit is seeking similar licensing deals to ensure compensation for its content. Anthropic confirmed it has not crawled Reddit since mid-May, while Microsoft declined to comment on the situation.