Reddit CEO claims Microsoft must pay to search the site

After reaching agreements with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman called on Microsoft and others to pay up if they want to continue collecting data from the site. "Without these agreements, we have no say or knowledge about how our data is displayed or how it's used, so we're put in a position where we have to block people who don't want to accept how their data is being used or not being used," Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically criticized Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying, "It was a real pain to block these companies." Reddit has stepped up its fight against search bots in recent months. In early July, it updated its robots.txt file to block crawlers that don't have contracts. Then people started noticing that Reddit results only showed up in Google results (where Reddit pays to show its data) and not in other search engines like Bing.

Huffman said Microsoft uses Reddit data to train its AI and summarizes that content in Bing results "without telling us," and that Reddit data is also sold to other search engines through the Bing API. In the interview, he referenced the recent comment of the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, during a conference that public data on the Internet are "free". "We have made Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity act as if all the content on the Internet is free for them," said Huffman. "It's their real position."

In response to Reddit's results that recently disappeared from Bing, Microsoft's research manager Jordi Ribas said on X that "Reddit prevented their site for research, promoting another search engine and impactors Competition of bing and bing engines. " Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston, said separately to The Verge last week that "we honor the instructions provided by websites that did not want content on their pages to be used with our generative AI models. Huffman underlined the recent OPENAI of Searchgpt OPENAI, which will be able to display the results of Reddit thanks to an agreement that the two companies have concluded earlier this year, as the model it wishes to reproduce. Reddit's content licensing deals to date have not included exclusive use of its data, according to spokesman Tim Rathschmidt.

By inviting licensing deals, Reddit is joining more traditional media publishers (including Vox Media, parent company of The Verge) in getting paid by making their content available to generative AI. "I think the traditional exchange of search engines has changed," said Huffman. "Research, summoning, and training are united, and the exchange of RAW value is dirty in exchange for replacement." After the publication of the story, the representative of mankind Jennifer Martinez sent the following declaration. "Reddit has been on the list of Web slip blocks since mid -May. We respect Robots.txt, an industry for blocking web crawls. " Microsoft refused to comment on this story. The embarrassment did not respond to the comment request.