What happened
On October 22, 2025, Reddit filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan against AI search startup Perplexity and three data-scraping firms, SerpApi, Oxylabs UAB, and AWMProxy, accusing them of 'industrial-scale' unauthorized collection of Reddit's user content. According to the complaint, the scraping companies harvested Reddit data via Google search results and resold it, and Perplexity bought such data from at least one of them. Reddit said it created a hidden 'honeypot' post visible only to Google's crawler; when that post later appeared in Perplexity's results, Reddit argued it was proof that Perplexity's pipeline obtained Reddit content through scraping rather than a licensed route.
Reddit framed the claims around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and circumvention of access controls, seeking a permanent injunction, damages, and disgorgement of profits from the alleged misuse of its content. The suit followed Reddit's lucrative licensing deals with Google and OpenAI and signaled that the company intended to defend its data as a paid asset, drawing a sharp legal line between authorized partners and firms it accused of free-riding. The case became a closely watched test of how courts treat AI data scraping and the value of platform-hosted human content.