In June 2023, thousands of subreddits went dark. Moderators made their communities private to protest a sudden change in how Reddit charged for API access — the change that killed Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync, and most of the third-party apps people had spent years building their browsing habits around. Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, said it would cost him roughly twenty million dollars a year to keep the app running under the new pricing. He shut it down on June 30. Reading the coverage at the time, the story looked like a community in revolt against a clumsy, greedy company.
Three years later, it’s clear what was actually happening. And it has more to do with your business than the original framing suggested.
What the Protest Was Actually About
Reddit didn’t decide to start charging for its API because it suddenly needed the money from a few app developers. It started charging because AI companies — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others — had been quietly scraping the site for years to train their language models, and Reddit’s executives realized they were sitting on something genuinely valuable. The third-party apps were collateral.
What Reddit got out of the fight is now public record. The company filed for an IPO in February 2024, and on the same day announced a sixty-million-dollar-a-year content licensing deal with Google. A few months later it signed a similar agreement with OpenAI, reportedly worth around seventy million annually. AI licensing now accounts for roughly ten percent of Reddit’s revenue, and the company has sued Anthropic for allegedly continuing to scrape the site after agreeing not to. By any measure that matters in a boardroom, Reddit won the fight. The blackout is forgotten. The apps are gone. The cheques arrive every quarter.
Why This Stopped Being a Reddit Story
The same fight is now happening everywhere. Twitter — now X — gutted its API in early 2023 for the same reasons. Stack Overflow signed its own deal with OpenAI and banned users who tried to delete their answers in protest. Major news publishers have either signed licensing agreements (the AP, News Corp, Axel Springer) or sued (the New York Times). Reddit blocked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from crawling most of its content in 2025, specifically to prevent AI companies from getting at archived copies for free.
The pattern is consistent. The platform takes the user-generated content. The platform sells it to AI companies. The people who actually wrote the content — moderators who spent a decade building communities, customers who left honest reviews, professionals who answered questions in good faith — get nothing. The transaction is between the platform and the AI company, with the content creators standing somewhere outside the room.
This is a real shift in how the internet works, and it’s worth understanding even if you don’t care about Reddit specifically. The “free” platforms were never actually free. The deal was that you provided the content and they sold the advertising. The new deal is that you provide the content and they sell it twice — to advertisers and to AI labs.
How This Touches Your Business
If you run a business, your content is part of this whether you signed up for it or not. Every Google review your customers wrote, every Facebook post you published, every comment under your YouTube videos, every Q&A answer one of your employees gave on a forum — all of it is the raw material AI companies want. Your own website is being crawled too. Cloudflare reported in mid-2025 that roughly three-quarters of AI-related web traffic was for training, not for answering live user questions. The training is happening, constantly, in the background, and you are not the customer in any of these transactions.
For most small businesses, this isn’t a five-alarm fire. The realistic harm from your competitor’s chatbot having read your blog posts is small. But there are two practical implications worth thinking about.
The first is that the platforms you depend on can change the rules suddenly, and the ones with the best content have the most reason to. If your marketing strategy assumes free access to a platform’s API, free embedding of its content, or stable rules around what you can do with your own data on someone else’s system — that assumption has been getting weaker for several years and will keep getting weaker. The Apollo developer assumed Reddit would keep its API affordable. The assumption was wrong, and Apollo died.
The second is that the things you actually own matter more than they used to. Your website, your email list, your customer database, your direct relationships — these are assets that don’t disappear when a platform changes its mind. Anything you’ve built on rented land is now exposed to a kind of risk it wasn’t ten years ago. This isn’t a reason to abandon social media or stop using third-party tools. It’s a reason to make sure that none of those things is the only place a critical piece of your business lives.
What You Can Actually Do About AI Scraping
Honestly, not much, and it’s worth being clear about that rather than pretending otherwise.
You can add AI bot blocking to your robots.txt file, which the well-behaved crawlers will respect. Cloudflare offers a one-click setting that blocks known AI crawlers at the network level, which catches more than robots.txt does. Some platforms (Substack, WordPress, others) have their own AI opt-out toggles. None of these are airtight. The companies that respect the rules will respect them. The companies that don’t, won’t, and there’s no obvious enforcement mechanism for the ones that don’t.
For most small businesses, the realistic stance is: assume anything you publish publicly will eventually be used to train an AI model, and decide what to publish accordingly. That doesn’t mean publishing less. It means recognizing that the things you put on the internet are now competing with — and being absorbed into — systems that can produce a passable imitation of your style and your knowledge on demand. The premium on actually being useful, actually being a real person who knows your customers, and actually showing up consistently keeps going up.
What to Sit With
The Reddit story is a clean illustration of something that’s now true across most of the internet. The value of user-generated content turned out to be much higher than anyone realized, and the people who created it are not the ones getting paid for it. That’s not a problem you can solve from your desk on a Tuesday afternoon. But it is worth understanding, because every platform decision your business makes from here forward sits inside that reality.
The Reddit users who spent years writing thoughtful answers, building communities, and making the site valuable enough that Google would pay sixty million a year for access to it didn’t get a cheque in the mail. The platform did. That’s the structure now. Knowing it doesn’t change it, but it does change what you should and shouldn’t build on top of.