Is it legal to scrape Reddit? What Reddit's terms and the courts say
Updated October 10, 2026
Scraping Reddit is not allowed under Reddit's rules unless you have its written consent: section 7 of the User Agreement says "scraping the Services without Reddit's prior written consent is prohibited." Whether it's also illegal is a separate question. US courts have mostly treated scraping public pages as a breach of contract rather than computer hacking, but Reddit is suing companies that scraped it at scale, and in Europe collecting usernames can bring data-protection law into it.
This page explains the rules and the cases as of 2026-10-10. It isn't legal advice. If you're building a business on Reddit data, talk to a lawyer and to Reddit.
"Allowed" and "legal" are two different questions
People ask "is it allowed to scrape Reddit" and "is it legal to scrape Reddit" as if they were the same thing. They aren't.
- Allowed is about Reddit's own rules. Break them and Reddit can block you, ban your account or sue for breach of contract.
- Legal is about the law: computer-access statutes like the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), copyright and anti-circumvention law, contract law, and privacy law such as the GDPR.
Something can be against Reddit's terms without being a crime, and still get your account banned or your company sued.
What Reddit's terms say
These are the parts that matter, quoted from the documents as published on 2026-10-10.
| Document | What it says |
|---|---|
| User Agreement, section 7 (effective 2026-07-01) | You may not "access, search, or collect data from the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) except as permitted", and "scraping the Services without Reddit's prior written consent is prohibited." Crawling is allowed only "conditionally", per robots.txt. |
| User Agreement, section 3 | No commercial use of the service or its content without a written agreement. |
| User Agreement, preamble | "By accessing or using our Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms." |
| Rule 8 (Reddit Help, edited 2026-10-06) | Lists "Scraping Reddit or its services without an authorized agreement" and "creating accounts through automated or agentic means" as violations. |
| Public Content Policy (edited 2026-10-06) | Content is "accessible to everyone, even without an account", and "you can use Reddit content for non-commercial uses, such as learning and community, but talk to us if you have commercial purposes in mind." It adds: "we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it's public." |
| Responsible Builder Policy (edited 2026-10-05) | Bans unapproved "commercial and non-commercial mining, scraping", inferring sensitive traits and re-identifying users. |
| Data API Terms (revised 2026-07-20) | Even approved API users can't mask their user agent, exceed call limits or train AI on the data without the rightsholders' permission. |
Two points stand out. "By any means (automated or otherwise)" covers copying by hand as well as bots and extensions; there's no carve-out for either. And the Public Content Policy's line about non-commercial use describes how Reddit thinks about its content. It isn't permission to scrape.
Can you scrape Reddit without logging in?
In practice, much less than before. Reddit's robots.txt has disallowed everything for every crawler since 2024. Logged-out .json requests were shut down after Reddit's announcement on 2026-05-28, old.reddit.com started requiring a login at the end of July 2026, and RSS feeds end on 2026-11-13 (Reddit Help changelogs, 2026-07-09 and 2026-10-08). When we tested on 2026-10-10, a logged-out .json request returned 403 and old Reddit sent us to the login page.
Legally, not logging in cuts both ways. In Meta v. Bright Data, a federal judge ruled on 2024-01-23 that Meta's terms didn't cover Bright Data's scraping of public pages while logged out, because Bright Data wasn't a user bound by them. That argument is weaker on Reddit than it was on Facebook, for two reasons. Reddit now blocks most logged-out access, and getting around technical blocks raises its own risk under anti-circumvention law, which is exactly what Reddit is suing SerpApi over (below). And once you log in, you've agreed to the User Agreement.
Can we scrape Reddit with bots or no?
Not without Reddit's approval. Rule 8 lists unauthorized scraping as a violation, and since August 2026 Reddit has messaged some accounts it suspects of running scripts. The approved way to run a bot is the Data API with credentials Reddit has signed off on, and from 2026-10-31 Reddit stops accepting new applications for public API access. Our Reddit API access guide covers what's left.
Court cases that shape the answer
No court has ruled on scraping Reddit specifically by an individual. These are the cases people rely on, with what they decided.
| Case | Decided | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (9th Cir.) | 2022-04-18 | Scraping public pages likely isn't access "without authorization" under the CFAA. But hiQ was later found to have breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and agreed to a $500,000 judgment and a permanent injunction (2022-12-08). |
| Van Buren v. United States (US Supreme Court) | 2021-06-03 | The CFAA is about whether you were let in at all ("gates-up-or-down"), not about misusing access you already have. |
| Meta v. Bright Data (N.D. Cal.) | 2024-01-23 | Meta's terms didn't reach logged-off scraping of public data. Meta dropped its remaining claims on 2024-02-23. |
| X Corp. v. Bright Data (N.D. Cal.) | 2024-05-09 | Most of X's contract claims were dismissed as preempted by copyright law. The case settled in 2025, according to Bloomberg Law. |
| Reddit v. Anthropic (California state court) | Filed 2025-06-04 | Contract and tort claims, alleging more than 100,000 accesses after Anthropic said it had stopped. In mid-September 2026 the judge let the contract, interference and unfair-competition claims go forward. |
| Reddit v. SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity (S.D.N.Y.) | Filed 2025-10-22 | Alleges they got around Google's anti-bot protection to scrape Reddit content from search results, in breach of the DMCA's anti-circumvention rule. On 2026-07-31 the judge let the core anti-circumvention claims proceed against SerpApi and Perplexity and dismissed the state-law claims. |
The pattern is clear. Hacking laws have mostly not applied to scraping public pages since hiQ and Van Buren. Contract claims depend on whether you agreed to the terms. Reddit's current lawsuits target companies collecting at scale on their own servers, and the SerpApi case is about circumventing protections. The Anthropic case and the SerpApi case are both still going, so this could change.
Did you agree to Reddit's terms?
Contract claims need an agreement. US courts look at how you were shown the terms:
- A link at the bottom of a page, with nothing you had to click ("browsewrap"), usually isn't enough (Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, 9th Cir., 2014-08-18).
- Terms shown clearly when you sign up, with a clear act of agreement such as clicking "Sign up" ("sign-in wrap"), usually are (Berman v. Freedom Financial Network, 9th Cir., 2022-04-05).
If you have a Reddit account, you agreed when you signed up. Anything you do while logged in is covered by the User Agreement.
Usernames and personal data
Usernames make this a privacy question too. Under the GDPR, personal data includes information that identifies someone indirectly through an "online identifier" (Article 4(1)), and a Reddit username can be one.
The Dutch data protection authority has been the most outspoken regulator. In May 2024 it said scraping by private parties is "almost always illegal" and that posting publicly isn't consent, while a hobby project shared only with friends can fall under the household exemption. Its scraping guidance, updated in April 2025, says private parties will usually have to rely on "legitimate interest", which needs a real interest, scraping that is necessary for it, and a balancing test against the people whose data is collected. How it treats purely commercial interests is under review after an EU Court of Justice ruling of 2024-10-04, so the 2024 statement is best read as the strict end of the range.
The practical upshot: if you don't need usernames, don't collect them. Exports from our extension leave out author fields for this reason, though a username someone typed into a comment stays as written.
Scraping on a server vs. reading in your own browser
Every case above involves a company collecting data on its own servers, at scale, often through proxies or by getting around blocks. We found no court decision about a person using a browser extension to export a page they had opened themselves.
That doesn't make it allowed. If you're logged in, you're bound by the User Agreement, and section 7 and Rule 8 still apply. What a browser-based export changes is the scale and the kind of activity: it reads one thread at a time, with your own session, at about the speed of a person, which is a long way from the server-side scraping Reddit has taken to court. Reddit's 2026 blocks target logged-out and high-volume traffic, and Reddit said logged-in access wasn't affected.
Things that lower your risk, whatever tool you use:
- Keep it small. A few threads for your own research, not whole subreddits.
- Keep it slow. Don't hammer Reddit with requests.
- Don't resell the data or build a product on it without a contract.
- Don't train AI models on it.
- Leave out usernames, and don't try to identify people.
- Don't get around blocks, logins or rate limits.
Where Comment Scraper stands
We don't have an agreement with Reddit, and installing our extension doesn't give you one. Comment Scraper reads only the thread you open, in your logged-in browser, when you click Export, with at least 1.5 seconds between requests, and it stops when Reddit says to slow down. It leaves out author fields and keeps exports in your browser. You're still bound by Reddit's User Agreement, so keep exports for your own research. Our comparison of ways to get Reddit data covers the other options and their trade-offs.
Questions
Is it legal to scrape Reddit? Reddit's terms prohibit it without written consent. US courts have mostly treated scraping public pages as a contract issue rather than a computer crime, but Reddit is suing companies that scraped at scale, and privacy law can apply to usernames. Not legal advice.
Is it allowed to scrape Reddit for personal research? Not under the User Agreement, which covers collecting data "by any means" without permission. Reddit's Public Content Policy says non-commercial uses such as learning are fine, but that's a description of how Reddit sees its content, not consent to scrape.
Can you scrape Reddit without logging in?
Logged-out .json requests and old Reddit have been blocked since mid-2026, and RSS ends on 2026-11-13. Getting around those blocks adds legal risk of its own.
Can I get in trouble for copying a Reddit thread by hand? Section 7 covers manual collection as well. In practice, the risk of reading and copying a thread is the same as reading it.
Does Reddit sue individuals for scraping? Its known lawsuits, against Anthropic and against SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity, target companies collecting at scale.