Reddit has blocked access to alternative search engines. Microsoft has confirmed that Bing cannot access Reddit. Here are the details!
Microsoft Confirms Reddit’s Block on Bing Recent updates to Redditโs robots.txt file have stopped Bing from crawling the site. This change came after Reddit entered into an agreement with Google. Microsoft confirmed that Bing has indeed been blocked by Reddit. A Microsoft spokesperson said, “We respect the robots.txt standard. Bing stopped crawling Reddit after the updated robots.txt file was applied on July 1.”
The robots.txt protocol allows websites to configure which pages a web crawler can or cannot access. These changes are not binding and work on an honor system. When a website updates its robots.txt file to prevent certain web crawlers and search engines from accessing it, there is no technical barrier preventing these crawlers from ignoring the request. Microsoft, in this case, accepted Reddit’s request, but recently, a browser linked to the Perplexity AI search engine was found to be ignoring a publisherโs request.
Reddit’s request came a month after the company first confirmed plans to update its robots.txt file. The company noted an increase in “clearly commercial entities scraping Reddit.” This change followed a deal made earlier this year, allowing Google to use user-generated content on the platform for AI training.
In a statement, a Reddit representative said the decision to block alternative search engines is unrelated to the Google deal: “This decision is not related to our recent collaboration with Google. We have been in talks with many search engines. We could not reach agreements with all of them because some were reluctant or unable to make enforceable commitments regarding the use of Reddit content.”
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