Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site

After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling connected Microsoft and others to wage if they privation to proceed scraping the site’s data.

“Without these agreements, we don’t person immoderate accidental oregon cognition of however our information is displayed and what it’s utilized for, which has enactment america successful a presumption present of blocking folks who haven’t been consenting to travel to presumption with however we’d similar our information to beryllium utilized oregon not used,” Huffman said successful an interrogation this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been “a existent symptom successful the ass to artifact these companies.”

Reddit has been escalating its combat against crawlers successful caller months. At the opening of July, its robots.txt record was updated to artifact web crawlers it doesn’t person agreements with. Then people began noticing that Reddit results were lone disposable successful Google results — wherever Reddit is paid for its information to beryllium shown — and not different hunt engines similar Bing.

Huffman said that Microsoft has been utilizing Reddit’s information to bid its AI and summarizing its contented successful Bing results “without telling us,” and that Reddit’s information has besides been sold done the Bing API to different hunt engines. In the interview, helium referenced Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s caller remark astatine a league that nationalist information on the net is “freeware.”

“We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity enactment arsenic though each of the contented connected the net is escaped for them to use,” Huffman said. “That’s their existent position.”

In effect to Reddit results precocious disappearing from Bing, Microsoft’s caput of search, Jordi Ribas, said connected X that “Reddit has blocked Bing from crawling their tract for search, favoring different hunt motor and impacting contention from Bing and Bing-powered engines.” Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston separately told The Verge last week that “we grant the directions provided by websites that bash not privation contented connected their pages to beryllium utilized with our generative AI models.”

Huffman pointed to OpenAI’s recent announcement of SearchGPT, which volition beryllium capable to amusement Reddit results acknowledgment to a woody some companies reached earlier this year, arsenic the exemplary helium wants to replicate. None of the contented licensing deals Reddit has done to day see exclusive usage cases for its data, according to spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt.

By calling for licensing deals, Reddit is joining much accepted media publishers (including The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media) successful seeking outgo for letting their contented provender generative AI. “I deliberation the accepted worth speech from hunt engines has changed,” said Huffman. “Search and summarization and grooming are merging, and the worth speech of crawling successful speech for postulation backmost is becoming muddied.”

Spokespeople for Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity didn’t person comments for this communicative by work time.