Reddit Faces Antitrust Counterclaims Over Alleged Google Favoritism

A new antitrust counterclaim has been filed against Reddit by SerpApi, LLC. The counterclaims allege that Reddit serves one crawler instruction file to Google and a different one to everyone else.

The filing references Reddit's own investor calls, regulatory filings, and policy pages to support its claims. According to the pleading, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee posted notice in the r/redditdev community on June 25, 2024, that a new file would take effect at the start of the following month.

The counterclaims name Microsoft's Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, and Qwant as casualties of Reddit's change. These search engines lost the ability to index new Reddit conversations from July 1, 2024. Microsoft publicly confirmed that Bing stopped crawling Reddit on this date.