Reddit Restricts the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

In August 2025, Reddit announced it would sharply restrict the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, limiting it to archiving only Reddit's homepage while blocking the preservation of individual posts, comment threads, and user profiles. A Reddit spokesperson said the company had been 'made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,' framing the restriction as anti-AI-scraping enforcement.

The move followed Reddit's lucrative data-licensing deals — including the ~$60M/year Google agreement and the OpenAI deal — and aligned with a broader strategy of locking down its content via robots.txt directives and access controls. Critics argued the restriction primarily protects Reddit's paid data pipeline while collaterally degrading a vital public-interest archive used by researchers, journalists, and ordinary users to preserve deleted or edited content.

Because the Wayback Machine is frequently used to document content that Reddit users or moderators later remove, the restriction also weakened a key accountability and transparency tool for the platform itself, raising concerns about the loss of an independent record of Reddit's history.