Reddit wants Microsoft to pay up if its search engine wants to crawl the platform

If Microsoft wants to include Reddit posts in Bing's search results – and the company's AI training – it looks like it'll have to pay up.

According to a new interview in The Verge with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit expects Microsoft to pay, like Google does, if it wants to crawl its website again.

"Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used," Huffman explained, referencing how companies like Google and Microsoft have been training their AI models using Reddit's data.

Reddit wants search engines to pay due to AI training

Last week, tech outlet 404 Media reported that Reddit was blocking search engine's like Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo from crawling the platform and indexing its pages. As a result, recent Reddit posts would no longer show up in Bing or DuckDuckGo search results.

One search engine that is still providing Reddit posts in its search results is Google. That's thanks to a $60 million deal Google and Reddit agreed to that allows the search giant to train its AI models on Reddit's data.

Along with Google, Reddit has also signed a deal with OpenAI, which will now be able to include Reddit posts in the search results for its new SearchGPT search product.

Huffman specifically cited Microsoft and AI companies Anthropic and Perplexity as examples of those that they are currently blocking for not negotiating on how they can use Reddit's data. 

The Reddit CEO also noted that it was "a real pain in the ass to block these companies," but claimed that it was necessary especially in light of comments from Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman about publicly accessible data on the open web being equivalent to "freeware," and, thus, fair game for AI models to train on.

Reddit certainly has legitimate concerns regarding AI companies training their models on data without providing compensation to the platforms they're scraping and crawling. However, the side effect of Reddit content disappearing from search engines is also unfortunate and doesn't bode well for the future of the internet.

It seems, however, that these are the consequences of search engine companies now becoming AI companies too.

Mashable has reached out to Reddit for confirmation and comment, and will update if we hear back.