Wealthy, sophisticated LLM developers would not have been scraping old reddit. They would pay reddit for API access.
Shutting down old reddit closes the door on back yard developers, not OpenAI.
And yet it did. And yet reddit mentioned shutting down API too
Correct me if I'm wrong, but contract has nothing to do with web searches. It was about training AIs, a data-licensing deal.
I learned more here, OpenAI themselves changed how the web search works; https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielalinzainescu/2026/08/20/reddit-nearly-vanishes-from-chatgpt-citations-after-openai-search-change/