Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from indexing most of its content, citing concerns that AI companies have been scraping data through the tool in violation of its policies.
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The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to archive post detail pages, comments, or user profiles, only the Reddit.com homepage. That means future archives will show which posts were trending on a given day, but not the conversations behind them.
“Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge.
Reddit says it will restore access if the Internet Archive can better defend against scraping and comply with rules like deleting removed content. The move follows a broader trend: Reddit has struck lucrative data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, restricted free API access, and even sued Anthropic for allegedly scraping content without permission.
The new restrictions begin rolling out today.