Reddit Content Policy Blocks Appearance of Recent Discussions on Non-Google Search Engines

Reddit's updated Content Policy has blocked recent discussions from the platform, disappearing from the non-Google search engine results.

The platform's recent policy states that crawling its website for AI training must be consented to first by the company.

Reddit Prohibits Website Crawling Amid AI Training Concerns

Search engines like Bing, Mojeek, and DuckDuckGo will no longer show results from Reddit's recent discussions. The past week revealed that the company has been limiting the amount of results to appear from non-Google engines.

Reddit is keen on using its Robots Exclusion Protocol to block bots from scraping data from the site. Aside from Google, the platform only allowed Internet Archive and other research-focused entities to continue scraping.

Last June, the company officially announced that its robots.txt would be implemented to prevent AI models from getting content on Reddit without any permission to supply their training.

The platform stated that it had "seen an uptick in obviously commercial entities who scrape Reddit and argue that they are not bound by our terms or policies. Worse, they hide behind robots.txt and say that they can use Reddit content for any use case they want."

Reddit Strengthens Ties With Google

Reddit previously inked an annual $60 million deal with Google, allowing the tech company to use the platform's data to train its AI models. The forum site also confirmed that it is currently in talks with multiple search engine providers.

There is also a rumor that Reddit plans to strike a similar deal with Microsoft. However, the negotiation is still ongoing at the moment.

In case the deal falls apart, Reddit could block Bing search crawlers. Microsoft already stated that it had stopped crawling Reddit's data since the implementation of the policy last July 1.