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Reddit has stopped the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from archiving most of its content, including post detail pages, user comments, and profiles. The change, effective August 11, 2025, does not affect its homepage, which remains indexable.
The action ends a long practice of regularly preserving public pages by the Wayback Machine for research and historical reasons.
The shift is targeted directly at preventing artificial intelligence firms from circumventing its licensing agreements. While the Internet Archive is a ‘good-faith actor,’ Reddit indicates that AI businesses have performed data scraping to gain archived Reddit comments from the Wayback Machine rather than negotiate direct access to the site’s data.
In an interview with The Verge, a Reddit spokesperson explained, “We’ve seen cases where AI businesses are breaking platform rules and scraping data off the Wayback Machine. We must ensure our privacy requirements and contracts are honored.”
Reddit has been openly commercializing its vast user-generated content in the AI era. The company struck a multi-million-dollar licensing deal with Google earlier this year and is reportedly in talks with other AI developers.
By blocking the Wayback Machine, the platform essentially shuts off a secondary data pipeline, preventing AI businesses from harvesting old content for free. Critics say this is less privacy-focused and more about safeguarding the commercial value of Reddit’s archives.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a long-time valuable tool for journalists, researchers, and historians, capturing glimpses of web pages that may otherwise be lost. Restricting access to Reddit material creates anxiety about the volatility of the digital historical record.
Groups within the site’s own r/technology and r/DataHoarder communities were dismayed, cautioning that other large platforms, or even government websites, would potentially do the same.
One commenter posted, “They want to sell post data to AI firms and do not want a second source for the same information. This is terrible news for archiving.”
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Reddit claims it notified the Internet Archive before applying the ban but has not specified whether the limitation is momentary or perpetual.
Meanwhile, the move highlights increasing tension between commercial data licensing in the age of artificial intelligence and the open preservation ethos that informs the Wayback Machine.
As platforms increasingly monetize archives, users are beginning to question if the internet’s collective memory will survive the paywall era.
